The problem with "Materialism"
There are all sorts of "materialisms": economic, dialectic, scientific, ...
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has not a special page on "Materialism" but one where it talks about "eliminative materialism", "Lange's materialism", "materialism of the encounter", "aleatory materialism", "dialectic materialism", "Althusser's materialism", ... The list is endless. There are 10 pages of different articles on "Materialism"! On the other hand, it has a single page on "Physicalism", which is a closely related term, but a broader one. The good thing about it is that it is much less ambiguous --more clear, I can say-- as a term.
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a single page on "Materialism" and this on "Indian Materialism"!!
I have never met a term more ambiguous than that!
Should we better then avoid talking about "materialism" --since it can easily produce confusion and misunderstandings in a discussion-- and use the term "physicalism" instead? Before doing that, however, we can maybe "give it a chance", by using a less specific definition of it, a reference that describes the term clearly and, most importantly, in a single sense.
This is what Wikipedia says about "materialism":
"Materialism is a form of philosophical monism which holds matter to be the fundamental substance in nature, and all things, including mental states and consciousness, are results of material interactions. According to philosophical materialism, mind and consciousness are by-products or epiphenomena of material processes (such as the biochemistry of the human brain and nervous system), without which they cannot exist."
For me, this is just fine, although I don't use the term as such, but only its derivatives, "materialist" and "materialistic", in a simple way, to refer e.g. to scientists as well philosophers who can only see and speak about the material aspects in human beings. (In fact, "materialistic", according to Oxford LEXICO, means "relating to or denoting the theory or belief that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications." This represents well what I'm referring to.
Now, what is strange about "materialists" is that they talk a lot about such things as consciousness, awareness, thought, imagination, love, joy, fear, and so on, none of which has been proven to be material (physical). Of course, since they are not substances. They do not consist of matter/energy. I know, there are a lot who will jump on me --a lot have done that until now!-- and say either that these are material or they do not actually exist; they are illusions. This is what a typical materialist believes, doesn't he? That whatever is not material, not physical, is not real; it doesn't exist.
I know that about 80% in here are "materialists", in the sense I described above. I know it from a poll and a lot of discussions I had with members in here up to now. But it's about the same with discussions I have gad outside this space.
So, I have this question: "Is there any meaning in talking about 'materialism' to materialists, since they can't see or think that there's anything else than matter, anyway?" That is, it is something self-evident for them. You can see this also as a paradox: "Materialism has no meaning for a materialist"!
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has not a special page on "Materialism" but one where it talks about "eliminative materialism", "Lange's materialism", "materialism of the encounter", "aleatory materialism", "dialectic materialism", "Althusser's materialism", ... The list is endless. There are 10 pages of different articles on "Materialism"! On the other hand, it has a single page on "Physicalism", which is a closely related term, but a broader one. The good thing about it is that it is much less ambiguous --more clear, I can say-- as a term.
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a single page on "Materialism" and this on "Indian Materialism"!!
I have never met a term more ambiguous than that!
Should we better then avoid talking about "materialism" --since it can easily produce confusion and misunderstandings in a discussion-- and use the term "physicalism" instead? Before doing that, however, we can maybe "give it a chance", by using a less specific definition of it, a reference that describes the term clearly and, most importantly, in a single sense.
This is what Wikipedia says about "materialism":
"Materialism is a form of philosophical monism which holds matter to be the fundamental substance in nature, and all things, including mental states and consciousness, are results of material interactions. According to philosophical materialism, mind and consciousness are by-products or epiphenomena of material processes (such as the biochemistry of the human brain and nervous system), without which they cannot exist."
For me, this is just fine, although I don't use the term as such, but only its derivatives, "materialist" and "materialistic", in a simple way, to refer e.g. to scientists as well philosophers who can only see and speak about the material aspects in human beings. (In fact, "materialistic", according to Oxford LEXICO, means "relating to or denoting the theory or belief that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications." This represents well what I'm referring to.
Now, what is strange about "materialists" is that they talk a lot about such things as consciousness, awareness, thought, imagination, love, joy, fear, and so on, none of which has been proven to be material (physical). Of course, since they are not substances. They do not consist of matter/energy. I know, there are a lot who will jump on me --a lot have done that until now!-- and say either that these are material or they do not actually exist; they are illusions. This is what a typical materialist believes, doesn't he? That whatever is not material, not physical, is not real; it doesn't exist.
I know that about 80% in here are "materialists", in the sense I described above. I know it from a poll and a lot of discussions I had with members in here up to now. But it's about the same with discussions I have gad outside this space.
So, I have this question: "Is there any meaning in talking about 'materialism' to materialists, since they can't see or think that there's anything else than matter, anyway?" That is, it is something self-evident for them. You can see this also as a paradox: "Materialism has no meaning for a materialist"!
Comments (519)
Well, there is a meaning to such talking, if wasting time qualifies as "meaning" ...
:grin:
(Thanks for rsponding to the topic!)
One can be any flavor of "vulgar materialist" (A); one can commit to neither the "philosophical" nor "methodological" position (B); one can be committed to either position and not the other (C1/2); or one can be committed to both positions (D). My own commitments, if you haven't guessed already, are most compatible with (D).
My view is that the Western philosophical and intellectual tradition was originally idealist or dualist in nature, grounded in the platonist tradition, which comprises more than just 'the dialogues of Plato', as it also describes Aristotleniasm and its subsequent elaborations.
The major turning point was Descartes' re-statement of dualism which had the disastrous consequence of conceiving of the mind into 'res cogitans', literally the 'thinking thing' or 'thinking substance'. At the same time Descartes was a major contributor to the scientific revolution and the 'new science' which arose out of Newton and Galileo among others.
[quote=Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, Pp35-36]The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop.[/quote]
And that's where it has largely remained. For the diehard materialists, what exists and can be described in terms of the objective spatio-temporal matrix is all that is real. As the mind is not part of this matrix, but actually the author of it, they cannot understand how it could be real and hence are obliged to deny it (which you see articulated most vividly in the writings of Daniel Dennett.) And that's why materialism has no meaning for materialists, as materialism defines their cognitive and epistemic horizons. It's the old 'a fish can't understand water' trope.
Of course, die-hard materialism of that kind may only be a minority view, but in my experience, many people believe in something like it, but they don't really think it through or articulate it. It's more like the accepted wisdom or reigning myth of the secular west.
(Thanks for your response to the topic.)
You seem to have digged into the subject quite well! :smile:
Well, I, on the other hand, am not for too many or complicated concepts, much theory, etc. on a certain subject, with a few exceptions. I am rather practical and I generally talk from a practical viewpoint. On the other hand, I am very strict about definitions and clear descriptions. Both of these things have to do with real undestanding (no misconceptions), common logic, experience (experiencing) and application in life.
And this is what my description of the topic was all about! :smile:
(Thanks for your response to the topic.)
I think you have put the subject into a good perspective and explained well the paradox-like "Materialism means nothing to materialists". :up:
This is why i don't believe that self-avowed materialists are materialists. Their identity isn't the same as their orientation. Materialists cannot relate their perceptions of objects to their thoughts concerning 'material objects' without pain of contradiction. They are smuggling their own brand of phenomenalism into their private definition of materialism whilst being in denial about it.
(Thanks for your response to the topic.)
Quoting sime
Right. I don't believe it either. Contradictions, as you say, and also ambiguities and lack of evidences --things the physicability of which is ambiguous or has not been proven-- make it very hard to believe it.
Quoting sime
I would like to hear such a private definition ...
I think that the same prejudice which constitutes the materialist attitude closes an individual's mind to the reality of how vast and truly unknown the unknown actually is. In other words, the proposition 'anything real is material' applies an artificial closure to the extent of the unknown, which limits a person's logical capacity to the confines of one's own conception of matter, and this restricts the person's capacity to learn. This act of restricting the unknown by assuming that a proposition like this, describing the unknown, is truthful, is very unphilosophical. Since this prejudice has become very deeply rooted in our society, and those who hold it are fundamentally unphilosophical, it is in most cases rather pointless to be talking to a materialist about materialism.
(Thanks for your response to the topic.)
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I agree.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I agree.
It's good that you brought up prejudice, which I believe has no place in philosophy, since it refers to lack of reason (logic, critical thinking) and experience, which are essential in philosophy and also vital in the creation, development and support of one's personal reality.
I've assumed that naturalism had replaced the term materialism. Naturalists generally argue that to the best of our knowledge all we can know is the product of natural processes. The six things you listed above are really one thing - the subjective experience of consciousness - and this may well be the by product of our physical brain. It's an ongoing question awaiting a definitive answer.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Some dogmatic folk argue like this. Responsible naturalists would put it differently. They would say that the time to believe non-natural explanations - idealism, gods, reincarnation, that only consciousness exists, whatever it may be - is when there is good evidence for them. These concepts then become knowledge and presumably, a part of naturalism. There's a Noble Prize as yet unclaimed.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
When it comes to prejudice, it resides as comfortably in the land of woo woo as it does on the continent of scientism.
Idealism isn't an explanation and shouldn't be associated with superstitious beliefs in the supernatural. Rather, Idealism is a subjective interpretation of the concepts defined by naturalism, in terms of the experiences of the observer. In other words, Idealism is a form of phenomenalism, but without necessarily implying the possibility of a phenomenalist theory of meaning.
To view naturalism as being ideologically opposed to idealism is to imply that naturalism isn't an empirically grounded belief system.
All this is true, at least in my own case. I prefer the concrete and physical to the abstract and immaterial. But it’s more a preference for dealing with a thing rather than a nothing. One I can point to, the other I can only find in the pure wind of idealist literature. So there is some thrift to holding on to the position: one needn’t waste his metabolism on what amounts to fiction and fairytale.
This is an interesting point. But then, naturalism is contrasted with supernaturalism --or, in a simpler way, natural is contrasted with supernatural-- which is not want we actually need, is it? And this rises questions like whether e.g. consciousness is natural or supernatural. If yes, it belongs to the realm of scientific methods, which I don't think have been much applied to it until today. From what I know, there are very few scientists who have been involved in the subkect of consciousness, like Menas Kafatos, Bernardo Kastrup, et al. (They do have some interesting, even exciting, ideas on the subject.) On the other hand, if we consider consciousness as something "supernatural", we enter in the field of religion --which is a very vast area, with a lot of truths but also plenty of misconceptions and other traps. Or we get into the world of angels, demons, spirits and other creepy entities! :scream:
No, I prefer the term "physicalism". It's much more clear and it draws a line --not always clear-- between physical and non-physical. The first one is open and offered for scientific study; the second one, for philosophical study.
Quoting Tom Storm
Even as a subjective experience, how can a physical thing like the brain produce something non-physical? And even if that were possible, wouldn't that then consist an acceptance that non-physical things exist too? Which, of course, is something the scientists, materialists, physicalists, naturalists, etc. don't believe exist. Doesn't this consist a self-contradition?
The subject of human conscicouness is open for too long a time for scientists, materialists, physicalists, naturalists to come up with tangible, persuasive and workable scientific results. I'm afraid they have lost their chance! :smile: The subject is offered only philosophical study.
"An explanation of consciousness will have to go beyond the usual methods of science. Consciousness therefore presents a hard problem for science, or perhaps it marks the limits of what science can explain."
-- "The Hard Problem of Consciousness" (https://iep.utm.edu/hard-con/)
Quoting Tom Storm
True.
(Thanks for your response to the topic.)
Quoting NOS4A2
Me too.
Quoting NOS4A2
It's good that you brought up "idealism". I din't want to do it myself for not "overloading" the subject and my description of the topic!
Well, exactly, one more bad or wrong thing with "materialism" is that it is often contrasted with "idealism", in which reality is asscociated with ideas and the activity of the mind in general. And this can bring us back to Plato and his "Ideas". But I think this is an obsolete subject ... Anywhay, it gets us into a foggy landscape and far from what one can simply consider as and call "non-physicality", which is much more clear and what we are usually looking for, I think.
I am young and new to philosophy, so please forgive my naivete. Without examining the ideas involved, I have always lived as a carefree materialist. I knew no better - raised by wolves, you will assume yourself a wolf.
But if I am to leave my foolish childhood behind, I feel a burning need to learn more. So I begin with a simple question, no doubt long answered by those who have argued these points before : One may assume you believe that we experience quale. Where do they come from? Not what are they - What is their source?
Yes.
If that is the issue we want to discuss.
Idealism is a philosophical tradition for which naturalists (and others) generally hold there is no evidence. I have not used the word supernatural but I can see how it might be an irresistible inference.
I have not introduced 'supernatural' as a concept. But I guess that is the inference one can make. Do you have good evidence for any well known supernatural beliefs - disembodied consciousness, god, reincarnation, ghosts? Those are fair questions. I understand the word supernatural is unpalatable to many people but words in this area are often loaded and people's reactions to them often say more than the terms themselves.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
It's not so much about what you prefer but which terms are currently in use for the idea you are discussing here. Naturalism is the term most educated skeptics and atheist philosophers would use. They would generally hold to methodological naturalism - that science is the most reliable tool we can use to understand the natural world and not hold to philosophical naturalism - that the natural world is all which exists. This latter claim being too totalising and unjustifiable.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
No. Knowledge takes as long as it takes. Uncovering knowledge does not run to a timetable. What you would be better off saying is that the amount of time it has taken to establish the nature of consciousness suggests it is much less straight forward than the naturalists have often hypothesised. But frankly modern neuroscience is still in its early days.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
I'm not a neuroscientist or philosopher so you are best asking someone with real expertise. In the mean time have a look into Thomas Metzinger's work and explanation of consciousness. There are naturalist explanations for what we think is non-physical. My view is that even if we could prove that thoughts are to mind what digestion is to the stomach (Searle) there would be people who wouldn't accept it as so many of us want to believe humans are transcendent.
Materialists don't say nothing else exists beside matter. They say that whatever exists, is based on matter. For instance, consciousness, feelings, emotions, beliefs.
If you keep on coming up with Strawman fallacies, you can win any argument -- until you are caught doing it.
Nobody knows that, and that's the current state of knowledge.
It happens. That's all that the materialists can say.
Let's reject the latter claim then, being to totalizing and unjustifiable. Now we are able to allow the possibility that there is more to reality than the natural world. And, if there is non-natural aspects of the world, we would probably be using something other than science to understand them, science being the means for understanding the natural aspects of the world.
So here's a proposal. The artificial aspects of the world are distinct from the natural aspects of the world, because they are created by human activities rather than by nature. And we know that these artificial things are not natural because they are caused through intention, which we understand through philosophy and ethics rather than science.
Does this work for you? Since there are these aspects of reality, intentional acts, which we understand through means other than science, does this give you sufficient evidence that the natural world is not all that exists?
Yes, this is the point of challenge.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Interesting.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Naturally occurring versus the product of intention hence artificial - interesting. I've always assumed human activities are a subcategory of naturalism. Are you drawing on a particular source for this?
As a source, look up artificial in the dictionary. The point though, is that if science is the way toward understanding the natural, then if we use something other than science, like moral philosophy, to understand intentional acts, shouldn't we conclude that these are not natural? Or would you say that we completely misunderstand intention, and we ought to use science to understand it, rather than moral philosophy. If so, I'd say that you suffer from the prejudice, "that the natural world is all which exists".
:up:
Quoting Real Gone Cat
'Qualia' are adaptive, cognitive outputs peculiar to the kind of CNS-brains with which natural selection has endowed us.
:up:
---
Existence: That which can be detected/perceived by our senses/instruments.
---
Physicalism: Everything is physical.
Physical: That which can be detected/perceived by our senses/instruments.
---
Nonphysicalism: Some things are nonphysical.
Nonphysical: That which can't be detected/perceived by our senses/instruments?
---
The way existence has been defined, physicalism has to be true. There's no difference between existence and physical.
Something's off, oui?
Options for nonphysicalists:
1. Redefine existence so that something can exist but be undetectable/unperceivable (re: neutrons, neutrinos, dark matter, etc.)
2. State that not all detectable/perceivable things are physical (re: the ethereal quality of electromagnetic fields).
It's no straw man. How is saying 'whatever exists is based on matter' different from saying 'nothing exists beside matter'? If something is based on matter then it can be reduced to it, which is basically what all materialism says.
Quoting sime
:100:
Quoting Tom Storm
I don't think naturalism and materialism are necessarily synonymous. In practice, naturalism often ends up meaning commitment to natural science as the only reliable source of knowledge. The problem then becomes what is considered as natural or part of nature. There are many things that occur in nature that seem to defy explanation in terms of what we know about nature, and the 'nature of nature' is something that is constantly being re-thought. 'Miracles are not against nature, but against what we know of nature', said Augustine.
Quoting Agent Smith
What about numbers? What about physical laws, like the laws of motion? These are predictive, and the predictions based on them are tested against observation. But in what sense do they exist? Is the probability wave physical, mathematical, epistemological or ontological? (Don’t try and and answer that, because it’s still an open question.)
The latter is reductive (categorical) and the former is not. "Based on matter" does not entail nothing-but-matter. A step further: "matter" – materiality – also connotes what matters publicly (i.e. distinctions which make measurable differences objectively) and not just what matters privately, imaginatively, subjectively, spiritually ... Democritus' void compensates (or covers) a few sins; to wit: "Whatever exists is based on matter" and maybe whatever else that doesn't / cannot matter in any objective sense.
As for ‘what matters’, that is a fallacy of the equivocation of two meanings of ‘matter’. And you can’t say such equivocation doesn’t matter, whether you’re materialist or not.
Quoting Wayfarer
An encyclopedia definition of materialist theory of mind:
Is that also a non sequitur?
I'm not a reductionist, so why do you ask? I've already disputed your premise, sir, which is why your question is again a non sequitur. Make the case that 'methodological materialism' is necessarily reductionist as you often assert without argument that it is. Absent this, you're just torching strawmen over and over again, Wayf. Sure, some scientists do believe so and are reductionists, but many who are philosophically literate – cognizant of the philosophical / methodological distinction I've already pointed out – do not practice their sciences on a substantially reductive basis.
Apparently, sir, your comprehension on many philosophical topics is internet definitions-shallow but, given your quixotic jihad against "materialism", dive a little deeper and make the damn argument (and then, maybe, corroborate it with wikis & pictures & whatnot).
Numbers, laws (abstractions really) can be considered to exist but not in the same sense as a chair or a seashell. In other words we need to redefine existence to accommodate them.
Come to think of it, a chair & a seashell are but tokens of types (abstractions: chairs & seashells).
Your words are interesting. "Suffer from the prejudice" I think that's a prejudicial way of putting it. :smile: No one can say that the natural wold is all that exists (yet), and I do not know the answer since key evidence is missing. Most of these debates end up arguing about what constitutes evidence.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I understand this but semantics are not my thing. We are talking about the paranormal or extramundane, not the difference between a cliff face and a brick wall.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think that's fair and I have kind of said this.
Quoting Wayfarer
As a quip, Augustine almost got it right here but remember he accepted an awful lot of unjustifiable nonsense too, so it's hardly surprising . I would restate this it Miracles are not necessarily against nature... - the time to believe is when there is good evidence. I don't really think we have a choice.
But what counts as evidence then becomes the new battleground. I generally stay out of this since disputes between irreconcilable world-views are not worth it.
Didn't say anything about it. I'm not 'strawmanning' or entering 'non sequiturs' except for in your highly idiosyncratic interpretation.
Again, a very simple definition:
That's the definition I'm taking issue with.
Quoting Agent Smith
Bingo, you win the lucky door prize. Now go ahead and redefine existence, check in when you're done.
Quoting Tom Storm
What will someone say about what we believe in 2000 years time?
I'm not a scholar of Augustine's works, but I've yet to read anything that he wrote about philosophy that I would consider nonsense. Of course, if I do, then I'll revise my opinion.
Well, a notable one would be that Yeshua ben Yosef was the son of God.
I don't expect anyone to believe it, but if that's an allusion to Jesus Christ, then I also I don't think it's 'nonsense', although I don't want to debate that point.
Lets...
Begin with something easy & familiar viz. God
God
1. Exists
2. Is not perceivable/detectable with either senses/instruments.
Existence: Is an aspect of reality that's
1. Empirically provable (the physical)
and/or
2. Logically provable (the nonphysical)
What do you think? Have I made progress?
I don't much care for Augustine's interpretation of that, but then, neither do the Orthodox churches, although there needs to be a secular equivalent of 'the fall'. But let's not go there.
It's a bit sketchy, smith. Where'd you study philosophy, from fortune cookies?
I would add, however, that there's a venerable tradition in which 'God' is real, but does not exist. See this OP.
(Thanks for your response to the topic. Although I cannot consider it as a reply to the topic! :smile:)
You say you are young and new to philosophy, and yet you terms as "quale". So it seems you are advancing fast! :smile: I'm old in both age and philosophy and I have only known about this term a couple of years ago. (It's a very modern term, anyway. And, BTW, the plural is qualia).
I never use this term. I prefer talking simply about perception(s) and experience(s). Their quality is of secondary importance, except maybe if one lies on the chase long of a therapist. :grin: For example, what you and I feel when we see a dog is from slightly to very different. It depends on our experience(s) with dogs, our characteristics/personality, our mood, etc. Some are afraid of them, other hate them, other love them and other are indifferent. And this is what they feel when they see a dog, depending also on the circumstances.
Now, about your question, where do they come from, i.e. what is their source: Our consciousness, reality and experiences in combination with our mind (memory, mental state, etc.) .
This is what I think. But you can find a lot of answers in the Web and judge for yourself about their logic and/or validity.
:smile:
Quoting Wayfarer
As anyone with even a single neuron for a brain would've noticed, nonphysicalism requires an overhaul of the definitions of real, existence, physicalism, etc.. There really is no other alternative.
Thanks for the link. I'll go through the article later if it's all the same to you.
I would suggest this: Delete the word "nonexistence" from the dictionary. Instead broaden the definition of existence like Meinong did.
Kinda like getting rid of the word "violet" and renaming the color as a different shade of blue.
(Thanks for your response to the topic.)
Yes, this is the conclusive question. But it is good to also know why! :smile:
:up:
(Thanks for your response to the topic.)
Yes, there's this interpretation too.
"Materialism" (Philosophy) from ...
1) Oxford LEXICO: The theory or belief that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications."
2) Merriam-Webster: "A theory that physical matter is the only or fundamental reality and that all being and processes and phenomena can be explained as manifestations or results of matter." (Closer to your point.)
I can accept this definition too, but on the condition that it is not taken to mean that something physical (matter) can create something non-physical, which is impossible. Something physical can only participate in the creation of something non-physical, which is actually created by something non-physical. (I explain why below, but it only extends my point ...)
***
See, the second definition has a flaw: It implies or may be taken to mean that something physical (matter) can create something non-physical. How can this be possible? Something physical can only participate in the creation of something non-physical by something non-physical. For example, consciousness (non-physical) needs the brain and other parts of the body (physical) to create a sensation, perception, experience, etc. for the person. Thus observation, thought, emotion, states of mind, etc. are created, which are non-physical.
So, if we remove this ... "impossible" possibility :smile:, what we are left with is that "matter can only create matter", i.e., "everything is matter". and this leads to the first definition of materialism that I brought up.
I could well accept this, but from my experience, there are very few among them who say and/or admit that.
(I have already mentioned somewhere in this or other topic that statements like "We don't know", "It's a mystery", etc. are at least honest answers.)
(BTW, thanks for your response to the topic! :smile:)
Quoting Tom Storm
No, not for any in your list! :smile:
Quoting Tom Storm
True.
Quoting Tom Storm
I see. Maybe as a way of avoiding the hard term "materialism"? (OK, this was a shot!)
Quoting Tom Storm
OK, I can accept this. Although I'm telling "too long", etc. but in combination with what I have said in similar cases, that it is quite evident that scientists look in the wrong direction and using the wrong tools. To the extent that somethimes fool themselves. Example: Some time ago, I watched a video on the examination of the reactions of a person to images presented to him on a screen by monitoringing his brain, after having opened a part of the skull and using electrodes to measure the current that it was produced. And I thought, are they so naive? Is this the way they are going to explain who the human mind works? Of course the brain reacts to external stimuli! This is known since eons ago! But this is all the brain does: it reacts! It receives and sends signals.
See the situation we are facing here with science? (Which, otherwise, is great in experimenting with and solving problems related to matter.)
Quoting Tom Storm
I'm not any of them either! :smile: But at the moment I feel fine with the partial --but still usable and generally reliable-- knowledge I have on these matters. I will consider contacting any of them if I'm going to pass exams or write a paper on the subject! :grin:
***
Thanks again for your contribution to the topic!
I thought you thought that thinking, feeling, consciousnessing, etc, were things that brains do? Just like digesting is what guts do and walking is what legs do. That is to say that thinking, feeling, and other mental functions are nothing other than the actions of brains. That's a reduction isn't it? You're not reducing to structure, I get that, but you are reducing to function, no?
Yes, that is usually the problem. It involves how we interpret what is evident to us ( i.e. the evidence). Differences in interpretation allow different people to say that the very same thing occurring is "evidence" of distinctly incompatible things. Interpretation always involves reasoning and the application of some principles, so when this varies there is variance in the conclusions drawn from the same observations. The observations are made from a different perspective'
For example, an atheist might observe the material world, and conclude that there is no evidence of God, while a theologist would say that the material world itself is evidence of God. The difference is in the reasoning and principles applied in the interpretation. The former assuming there is nothing beyond what is directly experienced, the latter assuming that there must be a cause of what is experienced.
Quoting Tom Storm
I think that you are trying to impose a biased restriction by making this claim. You chose to replace "material" with "natural". If you did this with the intent of opposing the natural with the paranormal, so that you could leave the artificial in some vague area which is neither natural nor paranormal, then this is not an acceptable proposal.
The problem is that you described the natural as that which is best understood through empirical science, and intention does not fit into this description. Intention is best understood through moral philosophy. So the existence of a brick wall cannot be understood only through science, because science won't determine the reason why the brick wall is there. This is why social science developed out of moral philosophy, and not from natural philosophy like the science of nature did. Therefore we cannot class the social sciences with the natural sciences because they use different standards as to what sort of principles may be applied in interpretation, the former being derived from moral philosophy, the latter being derived from natural philosophy. And as explained above, such differences in interpretive principles produce vastly different conclusions.
Quoting Wayfarer
180 seems to have great difficulty with the English language.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
This is the issue which Mr. Storm's proposed switch from "materialism" to "naturalism" makes clearer to us. When we consider the reality of artificial things, in contrast with natural things, we see that human intention adds something to the material world, in this act which we describe as creative. Simple appeal to "the forces of nature" cannot account for the changes which the human mind have imposed onto the material world. These awesome changes are all around us, and we cannot ignore the fact that they are evidence of a great power.
So the proposition that the material world creates, or produces intention is completely backward and unjustifiable as inconsistent with the evidence. The evidence is very clear that the awesome power of human intention introduces something new to the material world, which was not there before. It is completely illogical to turn back to the material world, and try to see how intention came from the material world, and how the material world endowed it with such power, when it's very clear that intention is bringing something into the material world which was not already there. That's what the evidence of the artificial shows us, that intention creates something new. Therefore we have to look to some place other than the material world to see where intention comes from, to find out what enables it with the capacity to give to the material world something which it did not already have. This "place" where we need to look is the immaterial.
I see the point.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Agree.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
:up: This part is quite inspiring!
"Intention" is indeed very important in all that we are talking about. I mention it quite often, in general, but I just missed bringing it up in this thread. Thanks for doing it youself and in such a nice way! :smile:
I like your approach to this discussion but I can't share this interpretation. The natural world has animals in it. They behave and do things. We can readily observe and explain this. Birds make nests. People make walls and houses. Not sure why we must accept intentionality (behaviour) as evidence of an enchanted world. Christians apologists like William Lane Craig and Alvin Plantinga are fond of this argument - via Anselm, I guess. This is a complex philosophical idea which is unsettled, so I will accept this point as a matter for further exploration.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The big difference is that the former follows principles of skepticism. The latter makes an unjustifiable jump from an extant world to God. Why God? Everything you argue could apply to the role of aliens in a creation story. Why could you not argue that aliens created the world using this reasoning?
What you describe is (a kind of) reductionism, and that's never been my position. In the philosophy of mind, my position is non-reductive physicalism, or, more precisely, enactivism (a mode embodied cognitivism, which itself goes back to e.g. Hume, Freddy Z, Peirce-Dewey, Witty, P. Bourdieu, et al) whereby mind-ing is what CNS-brains self-reflexively do with environmental inputs. In other words, "mind" is an emergent process (e.g. D. Hofstadter, T. Metzinger, A. Damasio), the cognitive functions of which supervene on a 'sufficiently complex' physical substrate (e.g. the human neocortex-connectome). The precise algorithmic mechanics have yet to be worked out in the neurosciences and so far, speculative objections (failures of imagination) notwithstanding, there are no physical laws prohibiting the scientific closure of the apparently intractable "explanatory gap".
Agree with you on that. My 'naturalistic' intepretation is that the emergence of life just is the emergence of intentional consciousness, albeit in rudimentary form. As soon as living things emerge, they begin to display the attributes of goal-directedness and persistence through change that are only ever found in living organisms.
In human form, life begins to reflect on itself, to try to understand its own nature and cause, which other life-forms do not. That is the advent of self-consciousness and awareness of oneself as a separate being, 'me and mine'. I think the 'myth of the fall' maps against that development, which in reality occurred over hundreds of millenia.
Where I see the religious enlightenment traditions providing a perspective in this great saga, is in the overcoming or transcendence of that sense of separateness, which is fundamental to the human condition. As Albert Einstein expressed it:
[quote=Albert Einstein, Condolence letter to Norman Salit, 4 March 1950]A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.[/quote]
Materialism fails in not seeing this dimension of the human condition.
Like e.g. 'the Earth being flat and not moving and at the center of "Creation"'. Human intuitions (e.g. "sense of separateness") are usually naive, parochial and wrong – just adaptively adequate enough for catching food and a mate – which is why your woo-of-the-gaps are so profligate and even somewhat effective, and why modern sciences (i.e. systematicallly learning how n o t to fool ourselves e.g. confirmation bias) developed so late in human history.
When Greek & Indian atomists proposed that whatever exists, at the very least, consists of "atoms & void", they did not claim "except human subjectivity". There are only epistemological distinctions but no ontological separations in atomism, sir. Your notion of (mechanistic) "materialism" is derisively called "vulgar" because it is pedestrian, unphilosophical, and patently false – you're just barking at the shadow of a strawman again.
You try to prove this by quoting Einstein.
The poverty of your position, as had been repeatedly demonstrated, is that you suppose that wonder, achievement, awe, adoration, love... are somehow incompatible with understanding of the physical world.
How small has religion become! Once it explained everything, physical, social, moral and political. Now it is reduced to the hope that neuroscience will not be able to explain why you raised your arm.
:100: :smirk:
Quoting Wayfarer
That's because when you believe you are "explaining", Wayf, you're actually just barking at shadows in your platonic cave. :sweat:
Materialism disappeared with Newton's action at a distance. And yet you and again insist on criticising a position no one holds.
Strong or weak?
Nonsense, absolute balderdash. Scientific materialism and/or physicalism is the mainstream orthodoxy of the secular academy. It isn't often spelled out, but it is generally assumed. Thomas Nagel's 2012 book was called 'Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False'. Similar ground was covered in Raymond Tallis' Aping Mankind. These are two mainstream secular philosophers, both of whose books were greeted with universal umbrage by the professorial class, the first being named 'the most despised book of 2012'. Apparently according to you, two books with no subject matter addressed to no audience.
There you go again! I bet you enjoyed Kindy.
I say because there are no materialists. "Materialism" is a term used by spiritualists to mischaracterise those who show that they are wrong.
Edit: A case in point of that mischaracterisation:
Quoting Wayfarer
I am not sure if that's right, but I can't argue against it.
After all, superstructures exist that are more than just the parts that make them up. But that's not a strong argument.
As an old friend of mine, Paul. A. S., asked once (he said everything just once, it is I who keep repeating his quotes), "Is the sum of a woman better than her whole?"
Have you considered this: all pain are induced by physical interaction. All pleasure are, too. And they consistently are produced the same, predictable way. Maybe joy, fear, and elation including religious ecstasy is a learned behaviour based on practiced physical reactions that produce pleasure or pain. This is a theory, not necessarily the truth. But it's just as plausible to say that "higher" order emotions are honed lower order feelings, as it is plausible that feelings, emotions and getting excited is impossible to explain with using materialism and its basic tenets alone.
This merely shows how big science seems to have grown. Science isn't even able to explain how, why, or with what intentions, elementary particles move towards each other or away from each other. Maybe already at the fundamental level God-given love and hate operate...
But it was just .
Ha! I guess intentionality, consciousness, something from nothing and whatever's left of Aquinas' five ways or proofs will always be offered up as potential defeaters of naturalism.
I'm not a scientist or philosopher, so I defer to others. But it does often seem that an argument from incredulity is employed by people who cannot imagine how the world could be what it is without some kind of transcendent or supernatural power. I wonder if I should stay out of these discussions in future... :gasp:
Scientific and philosophical illiteracy on full display. Of course, woo-woo is "The Answer". :up:
I think the 'whole is more than the sum of its parts' is quite a compelling argument actually, with a long pedigree. It's based on the observation that organisms seem to embody a principle of unity - that even through they comprise multiple sub-systems or components, all of these act together for a common purpose. That is called entelechy. For this reason, Aristotle has enjoyed rather a comeback in the biological sciences.
Quoting Banno
Quoting Wayfarer
So, tell me, if materialism isn't saying that the universe is explicable with reference only to physico-chemical causes, then what is it saying?
Have you ever heard of, or perchance read, Jacques Monod famous book, Chance and Necessity (1970)? Monod was a Nobel Laureate in Biochemistry, and this is exactly what he said. Likewise too Francis Crick, discoverer of DNA, who posits posits that "a person's mental activities are entirely due to the behavior of nerve cells, glial cells, and the atoms, ions, and molecules that make them up and influence them." That's what materialism is.
I don't honestly think that you yourself hold those view, but I also think you don't understand the issue.
Quoting Banno
Look harder.
I just took a paraphrasing of your quoting Wikipedia. If you argue against that, you argue against something you have already accepted.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
True enough, and in your credit, you did not argue against it... just stated that you think there is more to it.
I can't argue this. It is an undecided question at this point. All we can argue is what different schools of philosophy say; we can't argue whether this school is correct or the other or the third one. At this point, we can only decide which to believe, we can't decide which of them is true.
Poor old @jgill.
I consider this as a compliment...
Point is, I have taken a leap in the hot waters of fundamental physics and cosmology and have come to the conclusion that it's no more than a nice tale about the physical world. I understand the the big bang, particles at a fundamental level, serial big bangs, etc. At the same time it's a complete mystery why it's there and what it's internal nature is like. I can feel it, I can see it, I can describe it without a description that possibly can go deeper. No god of the gaps needed. Still I'm a lost soul... Thanks to you though I know why I live, what's it all about, and where it all came from. You are God playing hide and seek with themselves... A compliment!
That the universe is made up entirely of matter bumping into more matter.
And it is wrong.
Quoting Wayfarer
...then a list of articles rejecting materialism.
@Wayfarer
So what do we disagree on?
Quoting Wayfarer
I think you imagine materialists hiding under you bed.
It is a live subject in culture and philosophy. If you don't find it interesting, then why barge in with inane commentary?
Quoting Cornwell1
that's Alan Watts' The Book on the Taboo - one of the books that got me interested in the whole subject. In 1972 :yikes:
Truth is, I was invited. Doubtless you would rather I had remained absent, but you love it when I chime in. Always remember, you are not obliged to respond to my comments.
Odd thing is, we pretty much agree as to what is to be done. The narcissism of small differences draws us together, keeps us apart.
Quoting Wayfarer
Materialism (in the sense Banno is clearly using the term) and physicalism are not the same thing.
Materialism is/was the position that everything is matter. Its a view that is, obviously, inconsistent with our contemporary understanding of the world, since there are things which are physical, but not matter (quantum fields, for instance).
Physicalism is the position that everything that exists is physical (not material, in the sense of matter), or stands in some important relation (causation, supervenience, etc.) with the physical. Obviously physicalism is similar to and is a direct philosophical descendent of materialism (and very probably is "the mainstream orthodoxy"), but they are not the same, and it is extremely unlikely you've ever met anyone who is a materialist in this sense.
It boggles the mind that one can have such strong and dogmatic opinions on a given topic without having even bothered to familiarize themselves with the basic terminology. You'd think people would get bored with only ever fighting strawmen, rather than positions anyone actually holds.
:100:
To say that thinking is dependent on neural activity is not to say that thinking doesn't exist, or that it is immaterial (in both senses of the world). You could say thinking is non-physical (if you define the physical as that which can be observed and quantified).
Remember, what is physical and measurable is not mere matter, but in-formed matter; so the physical is always hylomorphic, whereas matter as such is not necessarily.
thank heavens for small mercies.
Quoting Banno
Totally reject that, by the way. Materialism is only one way of 'understanding the physical world', and it's a deficient one. Criticism of it is an entirely valid subject on a philosophy forum, in a thread on that very topic.
My view of philosophical religion, is that it is a form of therapy, specifically so as to awaken to the sense of wonder, and so on, that you refer to. And sure, many scientists, including Einstein, whom I already quoted, to mockery from you, are very much alive to that.
Quoting Seppo
[quote=Hempel's Dilemma; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hempel%27s_dilemma]Physicalism...is the claim that the entire world may be described and explained using the laws of nature, in other words, that all phenomena are natural phenomena. This leaves open the question of what is 'natural' (in physicalism 'natural' means procedural, causally coherent or all effects have particular causes regardless of human knowledge [like physics] and interpretation and it also means 'ontological reality' and not just a hypothesis or a calculational technique), but one common understanding of the claim is that everything in the world is ultimately explicable in the terms of physics. This is known as reductive physicalism. However, this type of physicalism in its turn leaves open the question of what we are to consider as the proper terms of physics. There seem to be two options here, and these options form the horns of Hempel's dilemma, because neither seems satisfactory.
On the one hand, we may define the physical as whatever is currently explained by our best physical theories, e.g., quantum mechanics, general relativity. Though many would find this definition unsatisfactory, some would accept that we have at least a general understanding of the physical based on these theories, and can use them to assess what is physical and what is not. And therein lies the rub, as a worked-out explanation of mentality currently lies outside the scope of such theories.
On the other hand, if we say that some future, "ideal" physics is what is meant, then the claim is rather empty, for we have no idea of what this means. The "ideal" physics may even come to define what we think of as mental as part of the physical world. In effect, physicalism by this second account becomes the circular claim that all phenomena are explicable in terms of physics because physics properly defined is whatever explains all phenomena.[/quote]
Quoting Janus
No argument there, I'm very drawn to hylomorphism, which is a form of dualism. The Professor where I studied philosophy was D M Armstrong, whose magnum opus was on materialist theory of mind. He wouldn't have accepted that. He said the mind is strictly describable in terms of the entities explored by science, and that when this was complete, there would be nothing unexplained.
Quoting Wayfarer
That's not a "materialist theory of mind". That's a physicalist theory of mind. A materialist theory of mind would be that the mind = matter. Because materialism, in the sense that's being used so far in this thread, is the position that everything that exists is matter. And its a position that no one has held in a long time. Physicalism is the position that everything that exists is "describable in terms of the entities explored by science", specifically physics... not materialism.
Really, really basic stuff here Wayfarer.
I actually asked @Banno to look over the thread as I was wanting to read something more rigorous in response to intentionalism as a defeater of naturalism. I know his reading of Searle and others is far more advanced than mine.
Quoting Wayfarer
Do you think this is an impossibility?
Ah, so this argument is for you the rejection of a father figure. Hence the passion.
Quoting Wayfarer
But as soon as philosophical religion brings forth a proposal, it is found wanting.
Yet that sense of wonder is clearly evident in the thread on the James Webb Telescope.
Physicalism/naturalism/supernatural/extramundane/transcendent - the words seem to trigger reactions and some of those words seem loaded and inadequate in these discussions. Are there better alternatives?
Even if such a project were completeable it would still be the case that science cannot describe lived experience. No one really can, beyond offering allusions, evocations and analogies. But then science should not be denigrated for being unable to describe the indescribable. or explain the unexplainable.
Science may one day be able to explain how it is that a physical brain can give rise to consciousness, but that would still leave out the ineffable lived experience of being conscious. Since the latter cannot be observed, but only directly felt, I don't think that's going to change.
Also, all scientific explanations are defeasible, so it will always be impossible to know whether any scientific explanatory theory is complete and final for all time.
Quoting Banno
What's wanting is any understanding of it from you.
Quoting Banno
Of course, it's an amazing achievement, and I see no conflict between respecting that, and what I'm saying in this thread.
Quoting Tom Storm
Why I think it's an impossibility we've discussed a lot of times (and I'm supposed to be mowing the lawn). But anyway, it has to do with the transition to modernity and the origin of the objectively-oriented consciousness. The terms under which modern science operates pre-supposes an implicit division between observer and object, it is all conducted on the basis of a mental construction (vorstellung in Schopenhauer) of the self and the world. It is outward facing, practical and instrumental in its aims. That has been the subject of many critiques by for instance especially Husserl in his The Crisis of the European Sciences and his commentary on Galileo and Descartes. It's also the subject of Nagel's book, and from a different perspective, the pinned essay The Blind Spot of Science and the Neglect of Lived Experience.
To put it succintly, scientific materialism is simply the attempted application of the methods of science and engineering to the problems of philosophy.
The background to this is the 'culture wars' between the Enlightenment concepts of science and religion (see the conflict thesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis). I think that is also the focus of much of existentialism and philosophy of science. In my case, I have sought the resolution to that conflict through non-dualism, which is a hard thing to explain.
Anyway the lawn beckons.
If this thread were entitled "The problem with physicalism", the agreement between @Wayfarer and I would be more apparent.
Right, "philosophical religion", which I think is verging on being a non sequitur. On the other hand if religion is understood to be a kind of poetry, then there is no problem, no? Because nothing expresses the sense of wonder better than poetry, or put another way, the expression of wonder just is poetry.
Yep, I've seen several talks on non-duality by Rupert Spira.
Sorry Banno - I'm doing this between meetings - can you expand a little?
To my eye, no pronouncement that might be called religious would have merit. Looked at at face value, they are senseless, and so not the sort of thing one might understand.
There is nothing to be understood in religious philosophy, or metaphysics in general.
There is no SEP entry on materialism as such because there are so many "materialisms", as the OP asserts.
What you are railing against is elimininative materialism, which treats experience as an epiphenomenon. From the point of view of science it is an epiphenomenon, whereas from the point of view of phenomenology it is central. Two different disciplines which by no means need to be at odds with one another.
But they are the sorts of things one might be moved by. Also they might be understood in an allegorical, metaphorical or poetical sense, if one has the "ear" for it.
But firstly, religion has no monopoly on such things. I find much more of such value in the garden, in the bush, in the gallery, than in the cathedral or the synagogue.
And secondly, where religion tries to say things about the world or about what we ought to do, it almost invariably gots it wrong.
Yes, you might say that all living beings, including us, are in a way "natural". But the matter I brought up, is what we, as natural human beings create. So the question is how is it possible that we as natural beings can create something unnatural. And we might see that all living beings behave and do things in a purposeful way, as rightly indicates, and this might incline one to think that they are all endowed with some sort of intention.
Now we have this principle, intention, which is not understood by science, but it is inherent within natural things, which are understood by science, biology. This casts doubt on your claim that science provides us with the best means for understanding natural things. We have a whole class of things, living beings, which have inherent within them, a principle, intention, which is better understood by moral philosophy rather than biology.
Because science has no approach to this immaterial principle, intention, it doesn't have the capacity to complete our understanding of these "natural" things, living beings. And, our principles of moral philosophy are greatly lacking in comparison with our principles of science, so our understanding of the immaterial intention, has lagged far behind scientific understanding. Since our knowledge of the immaterial has lagged so far behind, we cannot know whether or not it will give us a better understanding of the natural world, when it is provided with the chance to catch up.
Quoting Tom Storm
The jump is not unjustified if you understand it. All material existence is ordered, it is not just random parts in a random spatial-temporal order. So to be a material object means to be ordered. And to be ordered requires a cause of that order. This implies that there is a cause of order which is prior to all material existence, therefore an immaterial cause. It doesn't matter if you want to call this immaterial cause "alien", instead of the conventional "God", we'd still be talking about the same thing under a different name.
Nicely put.
I understand your argument but it doesn't change my view. Clearly life behaves and for my money this is a natural process. Thank you for articulating your view of intentionality so well and with just the right level of detail.
Physicalism perhaps holds that the best description of how things are is to be found in physics. Neither @Wayfarer nor I would agree with that - I doubt many here would. Imagine a physical description of a tennis match.
The poverty of physicalism becomes even more apparent when one turns from how things are to what one ought to do. Again, Wayfarer and I would I think be in agreement here.
But we differ markedly in that he seems to think there is merit in religious conversations, which I take to be at best obscuritan and more often evil.
That's exactly what can be described physically.
I think it's fair to say that religious tropes may enliven dimensions of feeling that the garden, the bush and the gallery may not. And, of course, vice versa.
Quoting Cornwell1
Not remotely with adequacy.
I'm not railing against anything. I am expressing a view on subject of the thread. Yes, the eliminative materialists, like Daniel Dennett, express the most uncompromising version of it, which is why I refer to him, who is assuredly not a straw man, as an examplar of materialism.
Quoting Banno
Quoting Janus
We've been in this exact point about fifty times. And no, it's not 'a kind of poetry' that I'm talking about. Consider, for only one example, the Buddhist Abidharma, "an abstract and highly technical systemization of Buddhis doctrine, simultaneously a philosophy, a psychology and an ethic, all integrated into the framework of a program for liberation." (Some of the well-known phenomenologists have incorporated abhidharma principles, for instance in the well-known book The Embodied Mind by Thompson et al, which has a whole chapter on it. )
The problem is that with ideas of what religion means being stereotyped in terms of the traditional 'faith vs reason' conflict. In ecclesiastical religion, faith is indeed opposed to knowledge. That was accentuated by Protestantism and its emphasis on salvation by faith (as documented by Weber in The Protestant Work Ethic). But this leaves no conceptual space for the kind of insight that the abhidharma texts (for instance) deal with (acknowledging they are not great literature.)
So there's this kind of background understanding that science with its third-party objective validation is the sole source of authority, while anything 'religious' is faith-based and so private or subjective or 'poetical'. When celebrity scientists like Brian Cox or Neil de Grasse Tyson gaze out at the cosmos in wonder, well, then that's cool, they're hard-nosed scientists! But if you say there's something which can't be comprehended through such instruments, why, then you're being obscurantist.
It's the role of philosophy to ask just those kinds of questions, and it has a common boundary with religion - or always did have, up until the demise of the German idealists and the ascendancy of the positivists and plain language academics and the other instrumentalist hacks that nowadays abound in so-called philosophy departments.
Quoting Wayfarer
It would seem not.
If it is not obscuritanist, then you ought be able to tell us what it is...
But then it would not be beyond comprehension...
This is the nonsense to which I point. Was that your own petard?
The connection between theology and philosophy was, for a while in the West, overbearing until the assumption of the literal truth of Christianity was, rightly, challenged and overcome.
Religious ideas are not to be taken literally; they are metaphors designed to inspire certain kinds of feelings and dispositions. The "role of philosophy" is diverse and ever-changing and is shown in the various domains of philosophy that have evolved, it is not something to be stipulated.
Religion, like poetry, in its own unique ways can be transformative; it cannot be informative; to think it can is a naive mistake. Those who think religion can be informative are fundamentalist; the worst scourge our society faces. That seems perfectly obvious to me and I can only hope that maybe one day you'll get it.
Why shouldn't it be taken literally? Religion is about gods who created the world. Where else could it come from?
Are you saying that you believe that in all the reams of religious material which exists throughout the world, there is absolutely no information there? Have you read it all to confirm this, or is this just some prejudice of yours, moving your hands and writing this for you?
I could explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you.
:grin:
And this is not obscuritan...
Give me an example of some information that comes exclusively from a religious text. (And by 'information' I'm not talking about being informed about what was believed historically and so on, I'm specifically thinking about information about the nature of the world).
An explanation will do, I'll take care of the "understanding" part.
Why do you now attempt to qualify "information" with "exclusively from a religious text", and, "about the nature of the world". What you said was an unqualified, "it cannot be informative".
How is one to know whether the information derived from a text is exclusive to that text.? And, wouldn't the fact that the same information is in another text serve to corroborate, therefore enhance the value of that information? And what's with excluding what was believed historically, from being a fact about the nature of the world? Is the history of belief not a part of your world?
which is what I think you think I mean. But then, if that kind of thinking circumscribes the whole of what is called 'religion' then obviously we're at an impasse.
But if you agree Quoting Banno
then, what are the alternatives? If a materialist ontology is insufficient, then what alterntives are there?
Look upon my Icon and tremble, all ye of TPF !!
Jesus, that really is a slender entry - I wonder why that is? Whole bookshops are devoted to the perennial philosophy and the quest to achieve higher consciousness and only this on wiki! It was all certainly a part of my life 30 years ago when I first encountered Gurdjieff, Watts, Krishnamurti, Madam Blavatsky, etc.
Seems to me this entire discussion, whether it be about higher consciousness or the miracles of Jesus, comes back down to what we think we can reasonably say about reality. One way or another we end up arguing over the basic building blocks of ontology and metaphysics and the risks inherent in certain views.
I guess it is easier for you to pretend I've no idea of that of which you speak; you don't have to pay attention to me.
I have experience with Transcendental and Samatha meditation. I've attended sessions with various Buddhist and Hindu teachers, and chanted the Names of the Lord. I've even sat in on seanmháthair performing the joyful mysteries - truly terrifying. Your desire for a quick path to enlightenment is not entirely foreign to me.
My experience has been that folk are too quick to claim knowledge of the transcendent, of higher consciousness, of magic. The saying inevitably detracts from the doing.
I just had a pizza with tomato sauce, mushroom, tarragon, feta and kalamata, on the verandah during a thunderstorm. Sublime.
Of course, if a Wiki article offends you, you ought fix it. I'm working on Philosophical Investigations.
As I said - I think physicalism is the default for the educated, secular intelligentsia. It is what remains, when the superstious babble of religion has been taken away, often unstated but nearly always presumed. Most of my real-world friends probably believe that to be true, but it's something I wouldn't discuss in that context. That's what forums are for.
Quoting Banno
You've completely won me over now, Banno. All is forgiven. :up: I might work on that article, it could help.
What I had said that you responded to was this:
Quoting Janus
If you think religious texts can be informative, give us an example. And of course the fact that people presumably believed what is written in religious texts is not an example of being informative in the terms I am asking for.
The fiery illumination of the transcendental breakthrough-breakdown is ample to unsaddle our senses. A potent, dizzying, total reframing of the parameters of the real can ruthlessly hoodwink the initiate, already seeking the power and comfort of knowledge, into receiving an experience as an epistemic revelation.
Not a wise move, a move green seekers make in neurotic pursuit of glory.*
*See Karen Horney on the link between neurosis and glory.
This bit from Revelation:
To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in his throne.
- in the context of an existential reading of the book of Revelation, where the old earth is understood to be the old, purblind self (beautifully destroyed) and the new earth is taken to be the self recreated.
But yeah, just incredible poetry. Poetry not accessible to folks who haven't experienced this sort of rebirth of self.
Are new thoughts new information?
Probably have to look at what we mean by 'information' here.
1. facts provided or learned about something or someone.
2. what is conveyed or represented by a particular arrangement or sequence of things.
"genetically transmitted information"
https://www.google.com/search?q=information&rlz=1C1RXQR_enUS982US982&oq=information&aqs=chrome..69i57j0i67j46i67i199i465j0i67i131i433j0i67i433j0i20i263i512j69i61l2.2784j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
Or something different.
In this sense, the Holiest of Books or the Most Exalted Holy Book is only informative to a point. After that it's trite repetition of knowledge one assumes to be true.
Why am I talking about this even in the first place? Because information that is given on something which something can't be CHECKED to be true is at best iffy. I mean, even at its best, is worse than iffy. It is complete nonsense. If you claim that X is true, then gimme some glimpse of evidence for it. Otherwise it's fantasy, not even fiction, but stream of consciousness-type wishful thinking, that some like to "own" because in their minds it gives them a special status... a status that has the french benefits of being in the "in-group", the literati, the initiati, the first causati, the dualati, the gelati, the assumotati.
The Buddhist ideas of rebirth and karma are not information in the sense I meant, because we have no way to test them.
I might take issue with your notion of information but if that kind of information is what you mean the challenge is thornier.
Quoting Janus
Psychology is aplenty with testable theories. (Plenty of the demonstrable; and in analytic behaviorism plenty of the definitive.) Let's pretend there's a branch of psychology called the Psychology of Overcoming. There kind of is: they call it positive psychology and it has its roots in Maslow's research on what to his view were extremely healthy minds. Minds with clarity, zest, inspiration, generosity, a deeply connected sense of life - and access to what Maslow called the 'peak experience.' An existential reading of Revelation reveals a kind of postulate of the Psychology of Overcoming or tidbit for the annals of positive psychology: If you overcome - whatever obstacle stands in the way of your (intellectual, artistic, emotional, etc.) growth - your mind will feel like it's on god's throne with god. There's no question this experience is possible however unsustainable to the typical sentience.
Revelation to my view was written in the peak state and conveys information about how to achieve the peak state - the state Maslow described 2000 or so years on.
which is strictly positivist. 'Positivism - a philosophical system recognizing only that which can be scientifically verified or which is capable of logical or mathematical proof, and therefore rejecting metaphysics and theism.'
And by force de tour, anything positivist has a negative twist.
I can see that Revelation may inspire religious feeling, but I can't see how it provides instruction as to "how to achieve the peak state". Anyway I did say earlier that if religious texts provide definite workable instruction for practice, then that would count as information. But that is not characteristic of most religious texts.
Not instruction - information - about how to achieve what Abraham Maslow called the 'peak experience': an experience of psychical ecstasy.
It's for the folks looking for that information. Seekers curious to desperate.
Information that can be used to eventually (at long last) create instructions for oneself. Sometimes you have to piece it together from maybe thousands of sources.
If it walks like a duck….
What material is your materialism made of? Wool? Iron? Silicon?
Is your materialism liquid at ambient temperature, or gaseous, or solid?
How much does your materialism weight, in kg?
Saying that "whatever exists is based on matter" is not a paraphrase of "nothing exists except matter". These are quite different things and carry different implications. (If this is the paraphrase you are referring to ...)
Can you please be more specific?
Quoting god must be atheist
Where are you referring to? (What did I state exactly?)
Quoting god must be atheist
What question are you referring to? (I can't see any question involved here.)
Quoting god must be atheist
What schools of philosophy? (Which school says what?)
All matter is in it's fundaments massless. Interaction between the fundamentals gives mass. Interaction is the motor. Why is there interaction? Because of the will. All forms of matter have will and various degrees of consciousness. Some forms even wear smiles and speak! They can be annoying though... :smile:
Strawman, again. You attribute things to others that they never uttered.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Can YOU be more specific? or less specific? Or more or less general? You are not arguing in the philosophical sense; you are drowning your opponents by overinundating them with questions. Some of them are relevant, some are not, and if you were a careful reader, you never would need to ask them. I am avoiding answering your questions because I feel you ask things already covered, and if you NEED more detailed explanation, then I am not in a position to satisfy this need; you need to ask someone who is willing to tell you what it is that you don't understand. I am not that person. I say things in ways I find appropriate, and I do assume others understand me. If a basic understanding is missing, then I don't hold myself responsible to be understood by those who do not understand me; they should seek outside help.
I am not my brother's keeper; if a person needs clarification, they should find their own resources to do so. This is not an educational platform; it is a social / cognitive platform, and as such, we can't cater to each other's every need, but only on a voluntary basis.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
What you said exactly is precisely what you said.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Jesus. You are really lost in this aren't you.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Now, in this you got me. I don't know any schools of philosophy, and I never attended one. I meant the different convictions we, as philosophers, subscribe to, when I said "different schools of philosophy". Thanks, finally this question of yours I could answer with a straight answer. Good question.
Rather than add my own personal opinion to the melting pot of Wikipedia, I'd rather just be skeptical of its high degree of subjectivity. But I've heard about some fun games the youngsters play with editing Wiki. Be aware, what you read might be the product of a silly game.
Quoting Janus
Let's start with the basics then, The Bible. Surely you cannot say that there is no information in there.
Take the gospels for example. How can you say that this description of the life of Jesus, and the society within which Jesus lived is not informative? You might reject it as completely and utterly fictitious, but that does not remove the possibility of it being informative. Compare the description of Jesus' life in the gospels with Plato's description of Socrates' life in The Dialogues. One might argue that Socrates is completely and utterly a fictitious character, but that does extremely little toward negating the value of the information found in Plato's dialogues.
So I'll repeat what I asked. Is the history of belief not a real part of your world? Do you exclude information about what people are believing at the current time, documented, and maintained for an extended period of time, from your category of "information"? Can you propose a better, more direct, and accurate way to access the ideas and beliefs of people who lived thousands of years ago, than through what they themselves recorded? Or does this not qualify as "information" to you?
I didn't say that you said these words. These words are from Wikipedia and Merriam-Webster, resp/ly. The second one is close to what you said:
Quoting god must be atheist
And since you didn't mentuion what the paraphrase was, I assumed that that was it. Don't you notice that I also added in parentheses "If this is the paraphrase ..."?
I think that all this is a waste of time. Thanks for your contribution to the topic.
The materialism is watery and bloody. It uses energy by ATP reduction to ADP. Hemoglobin transporters grab up oxygen from the lungs and release it in the brain to promote ADP to ATP again. The electric currents on the neural lightning form an idea of materialism.
Exactly. It matters not one jot if Socrates was fictional. What we have in Plato's literature is a method of enquiry that transcends the potential truth value. Plato is not dealing in 'revealed' wisdom. The New Testament, by contrast leaves us nothing but myths - a series of whoppers written about an itinerant preacher, produced for the most part decades after he lived by mainly anonymous sources. Not all ancient writings have the same status.
That's not how it works, but for the benefit of all I think it a good idea that you stay away from editing Wikipedia.
I suspect that 180 is using Mohamed Ali's "rope-a-dope" strategy, trying to wear you down by chasing his shifty position. He doesn't often hit you with a real argument, but merely throws accusatory jabs & jibes at you. He may think of his strategy as Socratic gad-fly, but it comes across as annoying-gnat. I take the bait sometimes, when I need the exercise. :joke:
To jibe means to say something rude or insulting that is intended to make another person look foolish.
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/jibe
(some serious irony going on here, I must say... 180 is the one who "doesn't often hit you with a real argument"? You sure about that?)
I agree. Self-evident axioms are a good starting point, but if not off-set by new input, they will go full circle, back to the original position, nothing learned.
An uncompromising materialist-physicalist seems to think of his worldview, not necessarily as Materialistic, but as Realistic. It's a Black versus White position, that makes no allowance for anything Idealistic or Non-empirical. Hence, their posting on a philosophy forum is not necessarily a search for Truth or Meaning, but for Superiority or Dominance. They may feel superior because they have Science on their side ; just as some aggressive Christians act condescending, because they have God on their side. Both prefer Assertion to Argument. For the haughty, two-way Philosophical dialog is for losers. :joke:
An axiom, postulate or assumption is a statement that is taken to be true, to serve as a premise or starting point for further reasoning and arguments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom
Superiority Complex : an attitude of superiority which conceals actual feelings of inferiority and failure.
Note -- I don't often quote Freud as a philosophical or scientific position, but he was good at making memorable metaphors.
It may be ironic, but "science says" assertions are not arguments. They leave no room for dialog. :smile:
Quoting Gnomon
Well, call me "nitpicky", but I find it's 'dogmatic pseudo-science rationalized by sophistry' that tends to "leave no room for dialogue".
The inferiority and superiority complexes come not from Freud but from Adler. :smile:
Plato's literature may display a method, but so do those "whoppers" which are called the gospels. These so-called "myths" demonstrate a method which created a massive following, a hugely influential religion. To me, that's an awesome method on display, and its significance far outweighs, Plato's method of enquiry "that transcends the potential truth value" (whatever that's supposed to mean).
You're right, poor wording. So I'm not surprised you went in the wrong direction. :wink:
I wasn't suggesting Socrates is superior to Christianity. That kind of hierarchical game I leave to zealots. My point was Plato's literature doesn't depend on historicity for its success. The method is what matters, not the biography. We can't really say the same about the Jesus stories. But whether Christianity (or The Rolling Stones for that matter) had a massive following and were hugely influential is scarcely the point.
Okay, so materialism is some kind of electric current in your brain. Fair enough. But why should my brain's electric currents care about your brain's electric currents? Maybe your electric currents are malfunctioning, or maybe they mean nothing whatsoever. If materialism is a sort of electric glitch, why does it matter?
It doesn't matter. It's just the way it is. Matter is charged. Charged with thoughts and feelings and has a mouth to speak and fingers to type.
I see what you are arguing, that it's a different type of information then. I acknowledged this already, it's information relevant to the history of ideas. Would it be correct to call this ideological information? What I objected to, is Janus' claim that religious texts are not informative. So I think this is the point.
Of course we can. The historicity of this or that philosopher is a matter for historians to debate. What matters to the philosopher is the message. One can read the Gospels for their message only.
Although one could perhaps stress its historical significance as a standard element of Marxism and other 20th century ideologies, and therefore indirectly as a cause of many deaths.
Yes, I know. Adler formalized it, but the general notion probably came from Freud. :smile:
Freud thought that a superiority complex was actually a way to compensate or overcompensate for areas in which we are lacking or failing
https://www.healthline.com/health/mental-health/superiority-complex
Yes and no. As we have seen throughout history what people think the message is depends on who is reading. If Jesus is not the son of god and was not resurrected, his message collapses in the eyes of most followers for whom the promise of everlasting life is the central attraction. Whether a few secular humanist still find some quaint and useful messages about ethics in the ruins of what's left over is a separate matter.
That applies perfectly to Socrates and Plato too. In fact it applies to quite a few philosophers.
Quoting Tom Storm
But these points have all to do with religious belief and nothing to do with historical facts, so I don't see the relevance. An historian is not going to come out tomorrow with a paper proving factually that Jesus' DNA doesn't match his putative Father.
You're joking right?
Historically some Christians have taken the resurrection as figurative, ie Jesus showing himself to his followers but not in the flesh, rather as a vision. These folks' religious beliefs did not include literal resurrection, and yet they were still reading some gospel or another...
In contrast, modern historians will have nothing to do with faith. They don't intervene in theological disputes. So the idea that the historicity of Jesus constitutes some sort of Achilles's heel of Christianism is ill-founded. In the current state of evidence, it is not an important or fruitful historical field. If additional evidence come to light -- eg archeological evidence -- then it may become a more interesting and fruitful historical subject.
In the meantime historians will study the historical data they actually have, pertaining to other topics than Jesus, Buddha, or Socrates, on whose lives we have very little evidence. For instance the Qumran community is a hot historical topic right now because of the Dead Sea Scrolls discovery and study. New evidence came to light, and historians started to study it. That's how it works. If we found a throve of 1st century Christian writings hidden in a cave somewhere, you bet that the field would open up.
If Christians were to accept that Jesus was just an itinerant preacher who was killed and left on the cross to rot (as per, for instance, Professor Bart Ehrman's work) and that the New Testament is essentially a series of whoppers, attempting to depict that preacher as a superhero, then faith would largely collapse.
You'd have to tell me where in the Bible does it say that Jesus was a god.
Quoting Tom Storm
Maybe. Most Christians are only vaguely committed to the actual teachings nowadays, so you may be right. They have made Jesus into yet another empty idol.
But others would recognize in the itinerant preacher who was killed something holly, something obstinately glorious, something radically novel, like they recognize as an important saint John the Baptist -- another itinerant preacher who was killed at about the same time (and not resurrected).
I was once on an interfaith christian-jewish dialogue internet board. Not much dialogue but much dispute happened there, the christians were mostly douches. But I the ex-christian turned atheist, kept interest in a few of them zionists and haredi and another more mystic Jew called Old Bear. They would all know the Talmud very well.
So as they explained, in the Talmud written in the 2nd to 4th century, there are bits and pieces about Jesus here and there, that compose the image of a poor yeshiva student, unruly and temperamental, who turned magician, a miscreant who was killed by hanging on a stick just before Passover. It's a sort of anti-gospel designed to protect Jews from christian proselytism. And of course all my interlocutors took the Talmud as authoritative.
And yet, now and then when I would post a parable or another from the Gospels, Old Bear would crack: "What a beautiful Jewish thought!"
In spite of their anti-gospel, the message was still resonating in him. In spite of loathing anything christian, he could openly admit to seeing deep, spiritually meaningful compassion in some of those passages.
Jesus is a resilient philosopher. You could say he is not so easily buried. :-)
Nice line. Thanks for the chat.
There's another big book on Amazon I've noticed that I'll probably never read, called The Bible Made Impossible by Christian Smith, a sociology professor. The gist is that the literalistic reading of the Bible that is characteristic of modern American evangelical Christianity in fact completely distorts its meaning (hence the title). I don't think this means he rejects the actual resurrection narrative, but the many other aspects of Biblical fundamentalism ('Biblicism') make the grave error of intepreting symbolic, allegorical and mythological language for literal truth. It is very much the attitude behind creationism and the fundamentalist anti-science rhetoric of American conservative Christianity.
There's a famous passage of Augustine's that I've mentioned before in this context:
[quote=Augustine, on the Literal Meaning of Genesis]Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience.
Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.
If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.[/quote]
Origen, another early Church father, likewise ridiculed those who read the allegorical meaning of Biblical texts in a literalistic way. In about the 2nd Century AD!
I think it would be fair to say that virtually all US creationism would fall under that criticism.
But there's another side to that also. Just as it is ridiculous to hold up Biblical literature as a failed empirical science, it's just as lame to claim that science 'proves' or 'shows' that such literature is false, as the Dawkins of this world are so easily prone to do. In other words, if you've never believed that the mythological narrative is not literally true, then the fact that it's *not* literally true is hardly news.
Augustine also justified the eternal suffering of those who gave up on their second chance of redemption. He was not speaking allegorically.
Paul was saying 'this world' was coming to an end and another would follow. It wasn't a footnote to a comment on a Greek text. It was front and center to what one was being asked to be a part of as a believer.
Yes, it's important for people to understand that OT literalist readings are a more modern phenomenon and held by Christians rather than Jews. I think I have posted that here somewhere a couple of times.
But aside from creation stories and other spurious tales in the OT, literalism around Jesus' divinity, mission and resurrection has largely been consistent.
Folk don't like it when you point this out.
Oddly, even many of those who profess to be faithless.
I don't have a dog in any of those fights.
But I can call out what is claimed to be allegorical or not, within a certain body of text, without claiming what I believe or not.
Yep. It's hard to see who's more of a dork, between a religious literalist and an atheist proselytiser.
I wonder sometimes if we live in different universes. Most folks I know don't care about St Augustine or even know who he was. Count me in too: i've never read his confessions and probably never will.
Wayf's quote i took as showing that literalists have been an embrassement to Christians right from the start. One could say that Jesus himself was fighting off Jewish literalists.
I don't see how the scientific evidence for determinism makes science at odds with Christianity. To be sure, it's at odds with some forms of it, but hardly a universal problem.
What you see with in Romans 7-8 is Paul dying a personal death from lack of agency due to being ruled over by desires, instinct, social pressure, etc. and being ressurected in Christ, the Logos, universal reason.
Like Aristotle, the intellect ranks at the top of the appetites vis-á-vis its perfections. Man sits within the circuit of cause and effect, yet can apprehend the universal laws that define it. This is what gives him some bit of agency, what makes him in the image of God. But this share in the Logos is small, unable to master man's animal nature.
Christianity is the cultivation of the Logos through prayer, discipline, and self-reflection, and ultimately an appeal and submission to the absolute Logos for the redemption of the self lost to sin (uncontrolled action).
Modern determinism focuses on man becoming a machine. Ancient philosophy and particularly early Christianity is focused on man degenerating into a beast. The root concern, freedom, is still the same.
Early Christianity is all about diefication through grace, and an internal change that leads to an inborn share in the Spirit and Logos.
To my mind, this synchs up pretty well with non-reductive physicalist philosophy of mind, and the role of top down causality vis-á-vis emergence as the mechanism through which decisions can be made. Of course said decisions are always constricted by physical circumstances and incomplete information, but there is also an argument to be made that absolute freedom is impossible, since choice only exists withing contexts, and context always restricts action (e.g., Hegel in the Philosophy of Right).
If you follow Lynn Rudder Baker on the claim that, for a choice to be free, one must understand the provenance of their wanting to make a given choice, and analyze that criteria in the context of a "truth is the whole" epistemology, then seeking the Absolute is the logical path to freedom. Since man cannot grasp this due to his finitude, you're left with the objective of I Peter 4, to live through God's will, essentially man striving for this absolute perspective.
Nor is science inherently deterministic. That's more a philosophical hangover from the days of materialism.
If the myth works for you, then you are welcome to it.
This seems like it has the problem of being a vacuous definition. What entities can't science attempt to study? This makes physicalism more a statement about espistemology than any sort of ontological claim.
The problem I see for non-reductive physicalism as an ontological position is that it's unclear what the truth makers of such a claim would be. And whereas Hemple's Dilemma doesn't seem like an insurmountable barrier for physicalist philosophy of mind, it does seem to be so on the ontological front.
At its worst it devolves into:
"What is, is" and "what is true is what can be proved by the methods I think can resolve truth," which isn't saying much of anything.
But that's all sort of beside the point I was making, which was that Wayfarer was equivocating between "materialism" in its historical sense (as the position that everything is made of matter, a view virtually no one has held in a very long time) and "materialism" in the contemporary sense (which is just synonymous/interchangeable with "physicalism"), a consistent theme in his silly, dogmatic crusade against any traditions/positions that are critical of his preferred flavor of supernaturalist/spiritualist/mysterian woo.
Even in principle there aren't any such "entities".
Yeah, methodological (instead of "metaphysical") physicalism ...
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
It's a "problem" of your own making, Count, because non-reductive physicalism is not "an ontological position" but a methodological paradigm (i.e. an epistemological criterion / paradigm) employed in the cognitive / neurosciences. Otherwise, if "non-physicalism", then account for Quoting 180 Proof :chin:
Quoting 180 Proof
Thoughts cause thoughts.
Thus, they are physical. (not just "non-physical"). "Thoughts" also physically conditionally cause bodily movements, so how can they do so and not be, at least to some sufficient degree, physical?
If thoughts are physical, is there something non-physical anywhere in the universe?
Quoting 180 Proof
How can something be "to some... degree" physical? If we're measuring degrees of physicality and non-physicality, what instrument are we taking our measurements with?
It's unknown.
What's known is that the distinction between physical and non-physical is centered on the idea that ideas are non-physical.
Without that distinction aren't we looking at another useless monism?
Yeah, abstractions ...
It's a figure of speech which charitably concedes that 'the physical' may not be – speculatively – the complete "story" (certainly with respect to methodological physicalism, which is ontologically agnostic).
Quoting ZzzoneiroCosm
No. Ontological holism consists of 'beings & nonbeing' (ergo "known knowns" & "unknown unknowns"). Woo-of-the-gaps beg questions the way [i]we do not know yet or cannot know" does not.
Abstractions never cause physical effects?
This is an important knottiness where folks like to get lost. Mistaking a methodology for an ontology.
Yeah, that's the point I try to make in this post .
How do you describe the distinction between and relationship of thoughts and abstractions?
I suppose you might argue that abstractions like freedom and justice (non-physical) cause physical effects only by way of ("to some degree physical") thoughts...
Process and metric (e.g. walking and distance-duration). Or apples and fruit ...
This suggests analogies but doesn't clearly describe.
So the thought of an apple can cause a physical effect but the abstraction, fruit, can never cause a physical effect?
How can this be known?
Is it important to continue thinking and saying this?
Try to eat abstract "fruit" instead of a concrete apple. :roll:
Exactly, that's the tricky part. If forced, I'd say that I am a non-reductive physicalist, leaning towards being ontologically agnostic. Whereas I'm happy to go further out on a limb in promoting a physicalist philosophy of mind.
Righto, it was a rhetorical question.
That's a fine position, but it's an idiosyncratic definition. Physicalism is generally understood to refer to a group of ontological models. The SEP article on physicalism is largely about issues in metaphysics (identity, supervenience, modality, etc.). The opening of the Wikipedia article (and isn't Wikipedia the world's book of democratic record?) starts off with:
The peerless Google algorithms appear to be returning an entire page about physicalism as an ontology as the top results.
I'm not sure what is particularly physicalist about "physicalist epistemological methods." The same methods are employed effectively by non-physicalists (Roger Sperry, Wilder Penfield, etc.). There are plenty of these folks, enough that articles about the problem of an excess of crypto-dualism in neuroscience are regularly published. Personally, I'm more surprised by how not dominant physicalism is in philosophy of mind. Only 52% of people specializing in the field opted for "accept or lean towards: physicalism," in the latest PhilPapers survey, a large decline from 70% back in 2009.
The issue I tend to come across in my reading and discussions is that physicalism gets conflated with the methods of science. Which to be fair, is understandable given science generally gives us physicalist answers. A problem arises when this leads to critiques of physicalist ontologies being taken as necessarily critiques or rejections of scientific methods. This is at least easy enough to clear up, but a more pernicious problem is ontological cheating, where scientific findings are used to imply metaphysical claims without being explicit about what those claims are, and what would falsify them.
For an obvious, and over the top example, some Quora post I saw today resolved the entire issue of universals once and for all because "red is a light wave with a 620nm wavelength." This one is easy to dismiss, but there are plenty of less obvious, but similar lines out there that essentially assume "fundamental properties and facts are physical and everything else obtains in virtue of them,” without stating so.
Edit: Should note that I notice this sort of ontological cheating far more in articles that are attempting to critique non-physicalist metaphysics. It's generally not quite as bad when there is debate about different types of essentially physicalist metaphysics, provided that one side doesn't mistake the presence of any metaphysics at all as somehow being anti-physicalist magicspeak, which you do see happen.
It would be almost the same as eating the thought of an apple.
Why no clear description and instead an obvious evasion or shrug?
Quoting 180 Proof
Your lines are misdrawn.
I can eat fruit and I can eat an apple. I can't eat the abstraction, fruit, or the thought of an apple.
1+1 is 2. This causes 2-1 is 1. However, 1+1+1 is 1 has caused a great amount of bloodshed in history against and by those who thought otherwise: the Ottoman Turks, the Arabian invasion forces, the armies of Genghis Khan; as well as against Barbarian tribes in the northern parts of the entirety of Europe, and in all the parts of the remaining world outside of Europe.
In Goethe's "The Hardships of the Young Werther" Werther loses his love. Werther then commits suicide. At the time period of a year or two after publication, twenty-five thousand young people committed suicide right after reading this fictional novel.
Sinful lives will earn you eternal suffering. Virtuous life and accepting the Holy Spirit in your heart will lead to eternal life in bliss. This causes people to swallow a piece of carbohydrate and drink some red wine in a cold building built by the community for the main and exclusive purpose to eat a piece of bread and drink a mouthful of wine.
:cry:
Do the other two examples stand on their right? I can't tell from here. I can't fathom the depth of my own thoughts.
Yes. The brain is made of matter, not pixie dust. Highly functional, highly systemmatized, genetically coded, matter of unrivaled sophistication. Thinking does not come from any other place in the known universe. That said, are you under the impression that thinking comes from non-matter? Because that would be some seriously mystical thought.
This is clearly what is going on in the universe. Anybody that says otherwise is thinking in terms of magic.
Every single thing you said is the result of matter. I eat bread, all matter. I kill myself, all matter. Such beliefs leading to those material actions are formed in a brain made of matter. Anti-materialism is anti-philosophy, anti-life, and anti-science. No other way to put it.
Numbers, grammatical rules, the principles of logic, scientific principles - none of these have a scientific explanation and cannot be meaningfully reduced to physical laws. They also can’t be meaningfully accounted for as products of evolution either without reducing them to biology,
(When I say scientific principles don’t have a scientific explanation - such principles are discovered by science, but science provides no account of why, for example, f=ma.)
These abstracts are, in fact, generated – via autopoiesis – in ecologies of (human) brains. You don't really believe, Wayf, abstractions can be "reduced" to mere woo, do you?
All of these things have scientific explanation. Also, an argument from ignorance is a fallacy. It wouldn't actually matter to your position if there were no evidence of mine. As it happens, each of those metrics are human generated concepts used to map perceived patterns of reality, with symbolic representation that is useful to the human being. The human does this through processes seen to by the brain which allows for the human consciousness to generate concepts to do just this, making Man the pinnacle predator of known history. There is no reduction, the processes being described to you are the result of 3.5 billion years of species evolution, the production of an apex species through the greatest, most destructive, terrifying, and majesterial crucible of competition imaginable. You are an alpha species among the starts. To reduce, or relegate the human consciousness to something beyond that majesty is beyond anything I know how to apprehend. What exactly is your position? Again, you didn't tell me where you think thoughts come from if not matter. You do realize that materialism is THE premier metaphysical school of thought right? The one all science is predicated upon and which proves its validity as a daily occurences in the sciences?
Quoting Wayfarer
F doesn't = ma. F=ma is a concept that humans generated to understand how to properly categorize it as a pattern. The why of things is functional, not intentional, as humans would understand things. The universe is of itself so, it doesn't require a why that is comprehensible to us at this stage in human development. You are anthropomorphizing the universe. Whenever you realize that such givings are a miscalculation between your nature and the universe, you will understand completely. Besides, the only way for us to master reality and learn its secrets, is to first obey its inviolable laws. Functions and meaning in the human sense will be revealed in time, as so much already has. A lack of explanation means only an absence of knowledge, that does not mean something extraordinary. Especially when one considers that the entire body of data of all fields of science indicate a material universe, an objective reality. To prove me wrong, all you have to do is present a single shred of evidence to the contrary. Not a thought exercise, not a blind spot of science, but actual evidence of something non-material. Any evidence will do.
[quote=Wittgenstein] The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are explanations of natural phenomena.[/quote]
"The whole modern conception of Wittgenstein is founded on the illusion that the opinions he posits are explanations of natural phenomena."
- Garrett
See how that works? Wittgenstein was wrong. Got an argument somewhere in there?
Another anti-realityist down the tubes. And here I thought this was a philosophy forum...
It's weird to see so many people on here, just like you on the mystic bandwagon, who never can give an argument about their beliefs in extra mundane phenomena that doesn't included insult, obfuscation, conflation, appeal to ignorance, or some other negation technique that, I guess normally works on the untrained minds with whom you regularly make contact with and present this trash to.
Luckily, there's still one rationalist on planet Earth on whom that shit doesn't work on.
They may be only an illusion, but they may be the illusions that correctly describe the world.
Wittgenstein did not prove the illusions wrong. He merely stated they are what humans do to figure out the world.
He used the word "illusion" but he failed to show that these illusions were invalid.
I hate: Wittgenstein, Socrates, Plato. I love Hume, Descartes, Marx.
There. I said it.
I also hate Rand and Arendt. Although one wonders how that can be, when one's name is the negation of the name of the other. (Something to do with the vague similarity of the spelling of their names that perhaps can be traced back by etymology to "Rand" and "Aren't Rand.")
Wittgenstein was saying that the laws of nature are not logically necessary - that they are contingent. Look at the context.
What isn’t?
:wink:
OK, only that it looks like these are my own words; it's a quote from Wikipedia ...
Matter is just a concept. Unless you can clearly define your concept of "matter" you might just as well be saying that the brain is made of pixie dust. Try it, exchange "pixie dust" for "matter" in some of your statements and you'll see that the meaning of your statement doesn't change a bit.
"The brain is made of [pixie dust, not matter]. Highly functional, highly systemmatized, genetically coded, [pixie dust] of unrivaled sophistication."
See, "matter" is just a stand in term, for something you haven't got a clue as to what it is, just like "pixie dust", so the two serve the exact same purpose in your statements. The real issue here is the question of how some instances of the assumed "matter" can be highly functional, and highly systematized, while other instances of matter are not. What gives your pixie dust ("matter") such magical powers, that it can come in all these different forms?
As Berkeley demonstrated there is no need even to assume that there is any matter there. Each existing thing is a just a form, each thing having its own unique type of of sophistication, as a particular, and there is no need to say that there is any "matter" underlying that form.
Quoting Garrett Travers
You are making the exact mistake you are accusing Wayfarer of, except we might say that you are materializing the universe, rather than anthropomorphizing it. You are invoking a magical substance, naming it "matter" instead of "pixie dust", and claiming that this magical dust is responsible for all existence. This given, which you take for granted as "matter", is actually your miscalculation. "Matter" is just a human concept, therefore it cannot make up the independent universe.
Quoting Garrett Travers
Now you're being hypocritical. You tell Wayfarer that laws such as "f=ma" are simply human conceptions. Then in the very same paragraph you proceed to say that we must obey the laws of reality. Please be consistent Garrett. If "laws" are human conceptions, then there are no independent laws of reality which we must obey. And if you assume that there is some sort of "laws" which are independent from human existence, then please explain who is writing and enforcing those laws. That's why Berkeley had to assume God. If every unique, individual, particular thing is reducible to a unique formula, its very own specific law which determines its exact existence, then someone must be creating these laws.
Quoting Garrett Travers
If you knew anything about the history of the concept of "matter", you would see that it is a central concept of western mysticism. So it is actually the materialist who is on the mystical bandwagon, summoning up a magical substance with mystical powers, named "matter", and insisting that this synonym to "pixie dust" is the cause of all reality.
The relevance is that the problem of many versions of physicalism being definitionally indistinct, at times to the level of being vacuous, is not a problem of my making.
It's a problem of soundness for the arguments and systems generally associated with physicalism. Obviously, it is a problem for not all such systems. I specified non-reductive physicalism because reductive versions tend to be better at avoiding this, on average at least (e.g., old claims that nucleons represented fundemental universals, while effectively killed by future particle physics, is an explicit claim.)
I can't tell you if your idiosyncratic version of the word has problems because I don't know what it entails.
I can tell you that when I've run across "methodological" physicalism before some have been sound (generally pragmatist), others have essentially been a bait and switch for ontological physicalism, and still others have been sound, but have nothing "physical" about them, which makes me suspicious that they were actually put forth as a means of arguing for ontological physicalism without being forced to actually defend it. As far as their strengths as epistemological systems, it depends on how expansive the claim is. Are the physical sciences a way of knowing things, of the only way of knowing things.
That's not why it was quoted, Banno. Anti-reality man was trying to pull a gotcha.
Shouldn't be an issue, here's google: physical substance in general, as distinct from mind and spirit; (in physics) that which occupies space and possesses rest mass, especially as distinct from energy.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, matter actually exists and is comprised of elements in the universe that have been identified and sourced. Pixie dust is something fabricated by the human mind.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, they don't. One is real and interacted with by every human every day until death, in a variety of forms. And the other is make believe.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That's not actually the real issue here. The issue here is, whether or not we understand all of the mysteries of matter is irrelevent to the fact that matter does in fact come in that form. Chemical reactions explain how they form into functional systems and evolve over time, explanations that cover numerous years of lesson material that cannot be covered here in a forum. Magic is a word of the mystics, not of chemistry and matter.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is unintelligible. Matter is a human concept that maps to reality, that's called correspondence. For you to be in any way correct, you will have to provide an instance of non-material substance that has existed. I am observing reality, not anthropomorphizing it, no matter how much you want to believe as much.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You misunderstood what I was saying, and what non-reality man was saying. He was wanting to know the why of things. The only thing humans can determine is the how. F=ma is the how, formulated as a concept, then used to map to reality. Read harder.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Laws of reality don't ask your opinion. Humans map those laws through conceptual framework, nothing else to it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No such explanation is required to know the patterns that govern reality.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, the mystical inclination to invoke something for which there is no evidence that has been plaguing philosophy for 2000 years, I am aware. The probalem you have there is the word "assumption," which implies zero correspondence. As it stands, every single scintilla of data that can be used to draw conclusions indiciates a material world of chemicals, elements, energy, time, and space all operating in unison in a vast array of reactionary states that give rise to life, planets, and all manner of other systems on their own.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Mysticism is a central concept to Western philosophy. And philosophy is a central concept to Western science. Newton himself was considered the last of the Magi. You've got it a little backwards, your history. Materialism is the slow and sure departure from mysticism in the history of philosophy and science.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This attempt to lie one's way out of the mystic bandwagon you are all on is not something that works on the informed. The magical substance you interact with to send these messages stands as a clear and overwhelming refutation of the position that the exposure to pixie dust has left in your brain regarding reality.
You've not demonstrated that any arguments I HAVE MADE with respect to "physicalism" are unsound or that my distinction of "methodological" & "philosophical" is inoperable or unwarranted, and this is why I find your comments irrevelant with respect to what I've posted on this thread. That said, Count, we clearly disagree (and many, if not most, philosophically-inclined practicioners of modern physical sciences disagree with you too).
Quoting Garrett Travers
The mysteries of matter include the 'how'. The concept of matter is not fixed. As the concept develops the explanation of the how changes. Is matter "alive" or does it simply give rise to life under certain conditions at a sufficient level of complexity? If the latter, then how? Does it organize itself? How? Is it intelligent or does it simply give rise to intelligence under certain conditions at a sufficient level of complexity? Is the distinction between what is and is not alive clearly delimited?
These and many other questions are not meant to indicate that there must be something outside the natural world that acts on it. It is, rather, that at this stage of the game "matter" is not an explanation for how things are as they are. We simply do not understand what it is.
Nobody said it was. The how is open for discovery. The "why" is not. Why is itself a human concept, that was my point. Not that matter is a concluded concept.
Quoting Fooloso4
The evidence points to the the latter, and no evidence points to anything else at this point in our development.
Quoting Fooloso4
Through chemical interactions, forces of mass and gravity.
Quoting Fooloso4
No evidence suggests it is intelligent. All evidence suggests the latter.
Quoting Fooloso4
Yes. Life: the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death.
Quoting Fooloso4
That's not what materialism posits. Materialism posits that the universe is a material one, that all understandings of it can only come from that base position. And there is nothing, no evidence whatsoever, of any kind, that suggests that such a perspective is not accurate. The ENTIRE body of all evidence across all domains of science suggest a material universe. That does not mean there are not mysteries. But, a mystery is not validation of an anti-materialist perspective.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism
The 'how'/'why' distinction is problematic. Using your example of chemistry we can ask why the combination of one element with another produce something that has properties that neither of the elements do. And why does it only occur under certain conditions?
Quoting Garrett Travers
How too is a human concept that is addressed in terms of another human concept - matter. That is my point.
Quoting Garrett Travers
And yet we cannot combine matter to get life. One problem is that a living thing is living matter but you are claiming that the evidence is that matter is not living. Another is we do not have an agreed upon concept of life. Here is a non-technical discussion of some of the issues: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2019/03/27/what-is-life/?sh=1e3018291c77
Quoting Garrett Travers
The challenge is explaining self-organizing systems at various levels. How does something without intelligence organize itself?
Quoting Garrett Travers
A base position without a solid base.
Quoting Garrett Travers
I am not arguing for an anti-materialist perspective but rather for a recognition that what the materialist perspective at any given time in the past is not what it is now and not what it is likely to be in the future. We do not know what matter is. We should be no more confident that what we proclaim today to be true than those chemists who proclaimed the phlogiston theory should have been. It was, after all, based on matter.
There's no point in asking why in the sense of meaning. The manner in which you just employed why, is actually to say "how is this happening?" A linguistic mishap that everybody falls into, of course. But, there is a clear distinction. It's just very hard for humans because we want the why of things, because we self-generate 'whys' at all times. Part of concept generation.
Quoting Fooloso4
A concept with a clear distinction that, much like f=ma, has correspondent value. Why, on the other hand, does not. That is exclusively a human concept that does not apply to the universe. Just like literature is a human concept, just like how is, but they operate in different domains of correspondence. How can be mapped to reality. Literature, and why, cannot.
Quoting Fooloso4
Through chemical interactions, mass, time, and gravity. Nothing more to it. Don't confuse naturally emergent structuralization with how humans organize things. That's mixing how's and why's again. One maps to reality, the other doesn't. Same goes for the difference between alchemy and chemistry; one maps to reality, the other doesn't.
Quoting Fooloso4
There's nothing more solid. It is the definition of solid. It is the foundation every scrap of science and what it has achieved is predicated upon. You simply asserting some weak attempt at simple negation is not an argument against the material reality within which you just attempted to do so. Asserting a position in accordance with points of ignorance in one's mind regarding certain mysterious of the universe, is the weakest possible argument one can muster, and has no place in philosophy any longer. And, I'm honored to be among the ones to be tasked with dispensing with such tripe.
Quoting Fooloso4
I give zero shits about what mysticism it used to be associated with, or whatever other influence was acting upon it that did not allow its proponents to see what was placed before them inviolably.
Quoting Fooloso4
This is anti-scientific, feelings based, assertion flinging without base. We know exactly what matter is. We do not understand all of its characteristics and dynamics, but that is not tantamount to having no knowledge of the subject. Matter is the substances that constitute the observable universe.
Quoting Fooloso4
Phlogiston theory was woo. Material laws have been tested and experimented with now for years. It was materialist science that relegated phlogiston theory to the dustbin of mystic history. So, in other words, I beg to differ, kindly of course.
Quoting Fooloso4
Yes, indeed.... Before we understood matter.
Wayfarer is good at complaining about "materialism" and parroting the same handful of quotes over and over. Actually arguing anything, otoh... that's not really what he does here. But that's more of a personal issue, there are anti-realists here and elsewhere who can (and do) actually argue their position.
More like, what is happening. I take it you are arguing against some notion of meaning and purpose as the reason for things. If so, I agree.
Quoting Garrett Travers
It is not a linguistic mishap. There are various senses in which we ask why something happens. If someone borrows a tool and it comes back rusty and I ask why, I am not looking for an explanation of the process of oxidation.
Quoting Garrett Travers
It depends on what you are asking about. The how of human motivation is murky but the why might be clear. An understanding of the world is not limited to the physical sciences.
Quoting Garrett Travers
A non-answer posing as science. These do not explain self-organization.
Quoting Garrett Travers
I am asking precisely how matter organizes itself. There can be no chemical interactions without the organization of matter. It seems that you are not familiar with the scientific concept and mistake it for something else.
Quoting Garrett Travers
There is a problem with attempting to explain the whole of science in terms of something that is not adequately understood. We cannot explain quantum physics or gravity or time by saying: well, its all just matter". The behavior of matter remains a mystery.
There is much more at issue here than you seem to be aware of. Again, I am not arguing against materialism in favor of supernatural forces. It is just that you are saying much less than you imagine you are.
Quoting Garrett Travers
To be blunt, you are sorely ill-equipped to do so.
Quoting Garrett Travers
Evidence in support of what I just said.
Quoting Garrett Travers
Which is it, we know exactly what it is or we do not understand all its characteristics and dynamics? It can't be both!
Quoting Garrett Travers
Is that singular or plural? Substance or substances?
Quoting Garrett Travers
What you don't understand is that we still don't understand matter. We understand some things, although that understanding is subject to change, but there is a whole lot, perhaps an endless amount that we do not.
Oh, I've stumbled across them. I don't know if argue is the proper teminology to use. However, I have a good deal of fun dumping this particular, viral, deleterious mutation on philosophical thought down the drain. Thus, I'm not worried. What's fun about the anti-realityists is that you never really know what they're gonna say next, but there are some common themes they like, such as appeals to ignorance and irrelevant conclusions. Lots of fun, really.
"What is happening," is the proper understanding of how, instead of why. So, yes, precisely.
Quoting Fooloso4
That's right, you already know how. You're asking why of the human, not of reality. Which is what I already said. You're agreeing with me in this instance.
Quoting Fooloso4
This is a completely incoherent statement. I have no idea what you're saying. Motivation is the why. Understanding of the world only comes from he refined arts of induction, and the products thereof. Name even a single other way that is not encompassed by that, and I will agree with you.
Quoting Fooloso4
Literally what science demostrates to be the case. You will never, as hard as you try, please be my guest, try to prove me wrong here, go find a SINGLE piece of evidence that shows that what is enumerated above is not the case. I will wait for as long as you need. You have been formally challenged.
Quoting Fooloso4
Again, mass, time, and gravity. This is basic physics.
Quoting Fooloso4
No, there's a problem with trying to negate science because there are mysteries, not the other way around.
Quoting Fooloso4
Yes, quantum behavior remains a mystery. Again, I already said as much. An argument from ignorance is not a fallacy that lends credence to the negation of material reality.
Quoting Fooloso4
And you are quite literally saying nothing other than "there's stuff we don't know yet."
Quoting Fooloso4
It is both, precisely. That which is know is definitive. That which is not, is not. This is called a false dichotmay fallacy. It seems your steeped in the stuff. Everybod that argues against materialism is. It's the only way to argue against it.
Quoting Fooloso4
Plural, that needs no explanation.
Quoting Fooloso4
I already stated as much. This is becoming nonsense. If you aren't going to read what I say, don't respond. Again, ignorance of certain domains is not an argument for ignorance in others. Matter is understood extrodinarily well, and that which is understood is definitive.
It may seem that way if you do not grasp what is at issue. When someone asks "why does metal rust or tarnish" they are not asking for a metaphysical explanation, but for the physical cause. You set up a false dichotomy with the distinction between how and why.
Quoting Garrett Travers
The fault is your own.
Quoting Garrett Travers
I am not trying to negate science! There is a problem with your lack of understanding of what is at issue here. You are so intent on honoring yourself with the task of setting the world straight that you cannot see what the issues are.
Quoting Garrett Travers
That is something you can take up with someone who has offered such an argument. I have not. You are barking up the wrong tree. But you seem to be so enamored with hearing yourself bark that nothing else matters. I am not arguing against "material reality" I am saying we know far less about it than you seem to imagine we do.
Quoting Garrett Travers
You would do well to spend more time reading about the history of science.
Quoting Garrett Travers
Once again, I am not arguing against materialism. I make no metaphysical claims, but have argued here and elsewhere that our best bet is to commit to some form of materialism.
Quoting Garrett Travers
But it does. If there are multiple metaphysical substances how to they function to form a coherent whole?
Quoting Garrett Travers
That is that:
Quoting Fooloso4
And yet:
Quoting Garrett Travers
Incidentally I've become interested in the relation between logical neceessity and physical causation. I opened a thread on Stack Exchange about it, but I am going to try and work up a substantial OP on it sometime soon.
That's what the word "how" means. When people use why in its plave, they are garmmatically incorrect.
Quoting Fooloso4
That's not a false dichotamy, that's literally the language we're using:
How: in what way or manner; by what means.
Why: for what cause or reason.
Not a false dichotamy, that's nonsense.
Quoting Fooloso4
No, what you said was self-contradictory and indicated no coherence.
Quoting Fooloso4
Okay. Then clearly state the issue, and I will address it. As it stands, what you are trying to argue is not something that is apparent.
Quoting Fooloso4
No, that cannot be what you're point is, because I already stated as much. I already said there are mysteries regarding matter. If this is your point, then you have gone around in circles for no reason.
Quoting Fooloso4
And you would do well spending more time reading about science.
Quoting Fooloso4
By means of the inviolable laws of the nature of the universe.
Quoting Fooloso4
Very well. I take it a step further: there is no such thing as another option. Everything else is make believe. That's what I argue.
Quoting Garrett Travers
Not even something that is a question.
That is an interesting bifurcation of experience.
When shown how to complete the square in algebra, I can learn a set of rules that will work each time I use it. The method does not tell me why the rules work. The rules to calculate are arbitrary until grounded by a reliable principle that makes them valid. In the realm of scientific inquiry, the dissatisfaction with mere plausibility is why the models keep changing. The validity is hard fought over and easily lost.
It seems like much of your use of the word 'material' is a version of Mind/Brain Identity Theory. A common objective amongst these many versions of the theory is to dispense with mind/body duality in explaining and investigating the phenomena. I don't see anywhere in this group of theories any kind of appeal for the duality between 'how' and 'why' that you propose.
No, I'm more in-touch with modern neurophilosophy. Much of that earlier stuff, identity theory and the like, was led to apologize years after being established for being anti-science. However, yes, the mind/body distinction is, quite literally, not a thing. The mind and body are all one. The brain produces consciousness and controls the body. Nothing in modern neuroscience suggests otherwise. The duality between how and why is a linguistic one. Nothing more. How is operative, and why is to do with causes and reasons.
Why is what you ask when you think f=ma means something beyond it being described within its operant nature. I listed the definitions above.
Citation, please.
Quoting Garrett Travers
That is not how the word is used. Your definition sounds more like a premise to a model, not something found to be true by one means or another.
I think that's a very interesting line of enquiry. I suspect that this is a major disconnect in modern philosophy, owing to the abandonment of the notion of formal and final causation.
At any rate, in the context of the discussion, I believe that aphorism is entirely appropriate.
Yeah, the whole history is on Stanford: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neuroscience/
Quoting Paine
Okay, we'll try just defining the word, so that you can understand what I'm saying to you and move on from this completely nonsense topic:
How: in what way or manner; by what means. This explains that f=ma.
Why: for what reason or purpose. This asks for what reason or purpose f=ma. That's not a thing...
Now that we understand how the "word is used," as I had already described its usage accurately and that it didn't apply here, we can move on now.
But the expression "F=MA" did not magically appear to you as self-evident fact. It came from years of people asking why things happen the way they did.
Edit to Add:
I scanned the article. I did not spot the "anti-science" part you spoke of in relation to identity theorists.
In other words, you're completely disregarding Banno's explanation of the context from which the quote was taken, and how it differs from the one in which you attempted to use it (a good and correct explanation, I should add).
Nevertheless, if I write something that gives you the shits, your pulse will accelerate slightly, your adrenals will uptick a little. But nothing physical would have passed between us. If, on the other hand, I beat you on the head with a stick - not that I would - then something physical would have taken place.
In what sense does it 'produce' consciousness? Like a snail produces slime? Like a producer produces a film? Like a magician produces a rabbit? Like a computer produces an output on a screen? Like a radio produces sound? Or some other sense?
This statement bears no relevance to what we're discussing. Asking why isn't what led them to the discovery. Figuring out how is what led to the discovery. f=ma does not need to be self evident, some things in nature need a conceptual framework to notice, see Wittgenstein, Frege et al. Now that we see it, we also notice that it is self-evident, as in, doesn't require an outside source to provide it with truth-value. Again, its time to move on from this, you staying stuck on this terminology bit is only going to make your points stranger and stranger. You see the difference in usage, that's all there is to it. How and Why are different, period.
As in the exact same way it produces sight, smell, taste, heart beat, blood circulation, etc. Literally just like that. That's why when your brain stops working, you stop being conscious. Very straight forward, mainstream neuroscience.
You are arrogant. That is a self-evident fact.
I will not hinder your progress with any other observations.
I am, indeed. Any other arguments in there? I swear you people on this website only know how to insult when your position is defeated.
Quoting Paine
How do you know? Did you define it correctly?
Quoting Paine
Feel free to, just don't continue trying to beat an argument over the head with a stick that's been thrown out in like two seconds flat.
I'm glad to see you're understand that material reality has laws one must obey. Good to know we're making progress.
Psychosomatic effects are physical. The words I'm seeing you having written are the results of physical actions on physical hardware. There is nothing non-physical about the entire procession.
You claim that 'why' is incorrect, but it is commonly used in that way.
Ironically, I see you were just quoted saying:
Quoting Garrett Travers
In this case, you are staying stuck on this terminology bit.
Quoting Garrett Travers
Those laws may not be inviolable. Rather than "read about science" read what scientists are actually saying and arguing about.
But I see that others have taken your measure. Perhaps something they say will get through to you.
Incorrect usage is a support for your claim, and not the actual definitions of the words?
Okay...
Quoting Fooloso4
Where's the irony?
Quoting Fooloso4
No, I was moving on from it because the words have clear definitions that I provided, which the two of you were using incorrectly, which as you said is "common." Talk about irony...
Quoting Fooloso4
Name one. Name any single law that is up in the air right now?
Quoting Fooloso4
Well, if the current theme of anti-reality continues, I will simply keep dismissing arguments with facts and science.
They're symbolic, which act on a different plane to the physical. Symbolic form only has meaning because you interpret it, which only a rational sentient being is able to do. Written words are only ways of conveying meaning. And the same information can be translated into a variety of languages or different types of media whilst still retaining the same meaning. So the meaning is separable from the physical form.
[quote=Howard Pattee, The Physics and Metaphysics of Biosemiosis] All signs, symbols, and codes, all languages including formal mathematics are embodied as material physical structures and therefore must obey all the inexorable laws of physics. At the same time, the symbol vehicles like the bases in DNA, voltages representing bits in a computer, the text on this page, and the neuron firings in the brain do not appear to be limited by, or clearly related to, the very laws they must obey. Even the mathematical symbols that express these inexorable physical laws seem to be entirely free of these same laws.[/quote]
No, they are made by brains and interpreted by brains. That's the material realm.
Quoting Wayfarer
With their brain.
Quoting Wayfarer
Writing is a physical action, interpreting is a physical action.
Quoting Wayfarer
Translation is a physical action, and no, meaning does not remain unless people who can physically interpret them, using their physical brain, do so. That's why languages your brain can't interpret - which is action as Wittgenstein reminds us "To interpret is to think, to do something; seeing is a state" - mean nothing to you.
Quoting Wayfarer
No evidence suggests the truth of this claim. Interpretation is a neurological process, not separated from the body. Sleeping people can't interpret anything for this reason.
Anything defined with "in general" is conceptual, so "physical substance in general" is purely conceptual. And so is "occupies space", as well as "rest mass".
Quoting Garrett Travers
So far you've only mapped matter to the above concepts, "physical substance", "occupies space", and "rest mass". You haven't shown how any of these concepts map to reality. So you've provided no indication of how your concept of "matter" partakes in "correspondence".
Quoting Garrett Travers
Laws are created by human beings. I'm still waiting for you to explain how you conceive of a law which is not created by human minds. Who would create such a law?
Since you seem really stuck on this idea that there are "inviolable" laws which you must obey, perhaps you could point me toward where I could find them, so that I might be able to read, understand, and therefore obey them. Since they are said to be inviolable, I think I'd better take extra time in understanding them, because the punishment must be very severe if I do not obey them. So please, lead me to these laws, show them to me. And don't show me human conceptions, and claim correspondence, I want to see the laws themselves, so I can judge whether or not the human laws correspond with the natural ones. Where in your materialist world do these laws hide, and how do we know how to obey them?
You know what the largest and most expensive machine in history is? Why, that would be the LHC. Its object of analysis is the very most simple things in existence, namely sub-atomic particles. There are enormous conundrums involving that and the so-called 'standard model' of particle physics. Meaning, we don't even know what 'physical' means. And the human brain is the most complex phenomenon known to science - there are more neural connections than stars in the sky. And you confidently proclaim it's 'in the material realm'.
Quoting Garrett Travers
You could study medicine for decades, and never find supporting evidence fo that claim, as it is not taught, and not understood.
The people of Hiroshima don't share your opinion, neither does science, and neither does that definition. In general does not imply conceptual, you just made that up. In general, all substances; that's matter. And (in physics), that'd be science, all things that occupy space and possess mass. That's not conceptual, you have misinterpreted the definition entirely. As if this has to be covered for you.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
If I have mapped matter to those concepts, then it has been mapped to reality, those concepts characterize reality. Newton and Einstein have done the rest for you. This is a poor attempt to negate reality.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Laws are not created by humans, they are noticed and provided a symbolic representation for by humans. And I don't know "who" you could be reffering to. It seems that mystics just say things that they want and claim it to be true.
But, here's a challenge: describe something extant without mass and which does not occupy space. That is the ONLY thing that could help your position, at all. No amount of trying to negate reality through the use of language can possibly help you. You will have to demonstrate that there is a reality outside of the one you live and are bound to.
You realize that the onus is on you to demonstrate that reality isn't material, right? The material nature of reality is already established scientifically and is self-evident, even by you every time you send a message through a physical device you are accepting as much. But, hey, keep this nonsense coming, I have fun squashing anti-realityism.
An argument from ignorance does not negate physical reality. Not understanding how subatomic PARTICLES, that's material, operate, in absolutely no way conceivable is a support for the position that reality is not material. To demonstrate that reality isn't material, it is YOU who must show that such things exists, as the material nature of reality is not only the scientific understanding, but absolutely self evident every waking moment of existence, to all people, at all times, including you. You demonstrate as much every single time you send me a message on a physical device, or continue breathing, or eat food, or do any activity whatsoever.
Quoting Wayfarer
Beyond any shadow of any doubt, there is NO evidence of anything other than a material world. Find me even a single scintilla of evidence indicating as much, and I will call you God. This is a formal challenge that another person, another mystic like you, didn't want to take. I offer it to you.
Quoting Wayfarer
Um, au fucking contraire:
https://qbi.uq.edu.au/brain/brain-functions/visual-perception
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15739
https://news.mit.edu/2014/in-the-blink-of-an-eye-0116
This is mainstream science, man. Has been for some time.
Yes, I will shoot down every fake argment you present against reality. It would be wise of you to "stick with your plan."
If you do not understand that "occupy space", and "possess mass" are both conceptual, then please read some philosophy before posting on a philosophy forum in the pretense of knowing something philosophical.
Quoting Garrett Travers
OK, explain to me where I can find one of these laws, so I might observe it, and be able to make a symbolic representation of it.
Quoting Garrett Travers
No, you claimed "the brain is made out of matter". The onus is on you to support this claim. All you've done is made some vague allusion to substance, occupying space, and possessing mass. And in the mean time, demonstrated a pathetic lack of understanding.
I knew your pathetic attempt to fight reality would only lead you to offer up insults like a coward. Coward, another concept, much like occupying space and possessing mass, that clearly maps to reality. Correspondence is cool like that. In this case, your anger at not being good at analysis, or philosophy for that matter, has led you to insult my intelligence, even thought it is indeed you who are denying reality with bullshit arguments. The metaphysical is the only domain in which you need to push your intellectual luck, science is not for you.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You've not the intellect to do such a thing. There's one law.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
White and gray matter, this well known science. This is so god damn pathetic. You mystics, man. Never know what they'll say next. You've been dispensed with, I'll be moving on from here.
Adieu.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3201847/
I'm waiting for you to address the issues I raised. Show me where I might find one of these laws of reality that you insist I must obey. Where is the substance of these laws? Where's the space they occupy, and the mass they possess? And quit trying to negate the reality that there isn't such a thing as "a law" in your material world. It's just a brain without an intellect which is saying these things.
You've been dispensed with, embarrassingly so, move on to something else.
You claim to have a scientific perspective, but I think the trend by modern scientists, especially physicists, is toward idealism. What's commonly accepted is a form of Platonism, the position that all of reality is composed of mathematics and laws, and matter itself is just an illusion. This is much more consistent with the physics of today, as matter has become an outdated idea.
This is just more of you embarrassing yourself. There is nothing true about this statement whatsoever. You have been dispensed with, guy. Move on.
All those bullets are being stopped by your feet. :grin:
Yep, the moment I walk up, they fall down.
I personally agree. He, however, did not exclude the possibility that the laws of nature as established by human scientists are right on. Maybe that's what "contingent" means. Contingent to me means "goes with it", or "seem to occur together", or "occurs at the same time as". However, Hume has established that several hundred years prior, so Wittgenstein can go suck an egg. Why he is revered to be such a great thinker will forever escape me. He simply paraphrased the obvious, or else paraphrased prior thinkers. He never made an argument or a logical proof himself. He stated truisms, but if you look at them, they had all of them been shown before him, so he had no original insight, other than into the obvious.
Probably.
hehaha
They're not 'established' in the sense of being set up by scientists. They're discovered - that is precisely what the meaning of 'discovery' is. I asked the question, 'what is not contingent', to which nobody here has an answer, and I submit that this is because there is no conceptual space in modern philosophy for the idea of a necessary being. All that remains is a God-shaped hole.
Have you presented your methodological physicalism here? I certainly wasn't responding to it in the prior posts because I'm sure I haven't read it, I was simply speaking generally about the topic. Hence, "I can't tell you if your idiosyncratic version of the word has problems because I don't know what it entails.
All I know about it is that it doesn't make ontological claims and all the scientist agree on it. But since I'm not aware of any disagreements I have with the methodologies employed by most scientists, as best I can tell, I'm actually in agreement with you.
There are some takes I've read where 1+1 "causes" 2, with the caveat being that these are generally eliminativist vis-á-vis causation as a whole. There was a quote from Russell posted somewhere around here on eliminating cause the other day.
Anyhow, some arguments state that "cause" is simply identity, generally because "things" are actually processes. So, if cause is identity, and 1+1 = 2, the proposition holds, although some pretty heavy baggage comes along with it.
I personally think trying to get rid of / transform cause muddles more than it clears up.
I had forgotten, this is a point I had meant to comment on. Abstractions generally have to be able to cause physical effects for a physicalist. Otherwise you end up paying the hefty metaphysical toll of embracing eliminativism towards abstractions. That may be a toll worth paying, but it seems a high one for a philospher.
Example: Racism is a socially constructed abstraction. Racism results in physical effects, such as hate crimes and measurable discrimination in the provision of physical public goods to the victims of racism.
Now, if a someone wants to say, "sure, that example is true, but it is true because racist ideas are actually physical processes in the physical bodies of people, and it is those people's physical bodies that carry out racist acts."
That's fine. Rebuttals of this type often take the form of claims that reduce racism down to the the level of "brains" or "neurons." This is a coherent claim, although it does entail reductivism in the aforementioned form.
However, it seems like this response is making the physicalist take extra steps (and potentially embrace reductivism they might not otherwise want to embrace). If abstractions such as "racism" are actually just names for physical phenomena, then there is no reason for the physicalist to have any qualms at all with saying that abstractions have physical effects, since physical phenomena can obviously cause physical effects.
If the argument is instead that:
A. Abstractions exist; and
B. They don't cause physical effects,
Then the position is more problematic for physicalism. Because clearly people think about abstractions (case in point, this site). However, if abstractions can't cause physical effects because abstractions are not physical, then how is it that people, who are physical systems, can interact with them? This seems like a position that is in serious danger of falling into "woo."
A way out might be for us to say that abstractions are a sort of emergent phenomena, that abstractions only exist in human minds as the results of thoughts. "They exist as neural activity only," could be a phrasing. However, this argument isn't actually getting away from the problem, since neural activity is responsible for almost all vertebrates' actions, which are physical effects, so it is still to be seen why abstractions are different.
Plus, even if we have a system where abstractions are somehow isolated from ever having physical effects, but still exist as physical entities within the physical constituents of minds, you still run into the problem of violating Ockham's Razor. If all meaningful effects are physical, and abstractions cannot cause physical effects, then abstractions have no explanatory power. But if abstractions have no explanatory power, why are we positing additional entities to explain something when less will do?
Which leads to the last option, eliminating abstractions. People once thought mental illness was caused by demons. We now know that demons have no explanatory power in that regard. Perhaps abstractions are the same thing. Like qualia, abstractions can be eliminated from our lexicon, at least as respects serious thinking about causality. This solves the problem of how physical people can think they can access abstractions, while said abstractions have no physical effects.
This radical line seems to come with several difficult consequences. First, eliminating abstractions necissarily means jettisoning most of the social sciences (and it is unclear how much would remain of the other sciences). Unless the eliminativist has a substitute for these with more predictive strength than the existing systems, it doesn't seem that jettisoning abstractions is actually clearing things up. Not to mention that it also seems difficult to explain other sciences when appeals to systems, networks, complexity, etc. have all been rendered meaningless.
Perhaps this is why there are no well known philosophers who are eliminativist vis-á-vis abstraction. It's easier to stake your claim on eliminating qualia, the heart of subjective experience, than it is to deal without abstraction. Plus, there seems no reason to pay this high price, since the claims of eliminativism are generally that whatever is being eliminated is actually something physical that is different from what naive realism thinks it is. But in that case, why not just say abstractions are physically instantiated?
This means of avoiding eliminativism isn't too far off an embrace of trope theory, or some sort of language based nominalism, versus having to embrace some sort of all out hyper-austere nominalism where only particular physical entities obtain and their traits are all unanalyzable truths.
Anyhow, if anyone thinks they have a physicalist system where abstractions aren't eliminated and still cannot have physical effects, but these issues don't obtain, I'd love to hear them.
The apple-image, the thought-apple, I ate in my nightdream or daydream last night or this afternoon, respectively, that I don't doubt you'll be glad to reduce to brain shocks and twitches.
It's only a reductionism. It's easy to do. A reductionism is easy to do.
But to do it you have to hedge out (kingdomless king!) the apple-image, the thought-apple.
Some folks are happy to do that, some folks aren't so happy. So many cups of tea.
I wonder if you've ever picked up Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents. The oceanic experience Freud describes in the opening pages - Freud writes that though he acknowledges the existence of the oceanic experience he has never himself had the experience.
Divide humankind into:
1. Those who have had (including those who have (more or less) learned to sustain) the oceanic experience.
2. Those who (like Freud) have had no access to the oceanic experience.
The former tend to feel there's something distinctly psychical about the physical world. The others are happy to reduce the world to the physical.
(You can tell which camp I'm in by the fact that I call it a reduction.)
Not to mention abandonment of the concept of moral agency, but that kind of goes without saying, considering the rest of the argument. It's why eliminativists are always keen to advance the claim that we're moist robots or some such, notwithstanding that such a claim radically undercuts the credibility of one who makes it. After all, why believe anything a robot utters?
The brain is not the same thing as its products, then?
What's the empirical difference between my temporarily ceasing to be conscious, and my mind temporarily ceasing to exist?
Does a brain 'produce' sight? A brain (in a body) might see. Isn't that more accurate?
Does a brain 'produce' smell? Only if you extract it and give it a sniff, it seems to me.
A brain causes a heartbeat, perhaps. The heart itself beats. I'm not sure any production is going on.
What exactly is the relationship between the functioning of a brain, and, say taste? Is taste nothing other than a brain functioning in a particular way, perhaps? Would you want to say that?
Is consciousness nothing other than a kind of brain function? Is that what you mean by 'produce'?
I've never been able to understand the basis of this claim that abstractions do not have any effect in the world. All a person has to do is open one's eyes and see all the artificial products around, to apprehend the fact that we cannot deny effect from abstractions. If we make such a denial, we end up with the proposition that chance occurrence is the cause of artificial things having the forms that they do. And of course that's just ridiculous.
This is a common, but I think unfair rebuttal. After all, if the eliminativist vis-á-vis abstractions (or qualia) is correct, we shouldn't expect them to be able to overcome this illusion. So if they continue to say they feel tired, or advocate against racism, etc. it is only because the illusion is so powerful, which is exactly what their theory predicts. Before enlightenment, chop wood carry water, after enlightenment, know that you necissarily must chop wood and carry water.
Right, there shouldn't be a need to reduce abstractions to claim they are physical. This was a major problem for me for a while. If someone challenged my non-reductive physicalism, I'd feel the need to claim that "x is actually an idea, so x is neurons," which of course is the type of reductionalist argument I wanted to avoid because I thought it had many serious flaws.
I realized the error one day when I started trying to explain supply curves as attitudes held by producers in an economy in terms of their brains. This makes no sense. A supply curve obtains as a complex interaction between many people, laws, enforcement agencies, the natural enviornment, disease, technological development, etc. It cannot be reduced to neurons. Doing so appears to also force you into a sort of linguistic nominalism, where people don't actually make propositions about things in the world, but about ideas about things in the world, or about words (e.g., Sellars).
However, I think the evidence for epistemological realism is quite strong, and so I definitely don't want to embrace the idea that abstractions are just words and connect to nothing. I also don't want to claim they are their neuronal correlates, because they also include references to non-human things, and making this claim will tell people you actually don't even know what is meant by "supply curve," since it necissarily includes things like the amount of a given metal left in operating mines.
I don't see how this holds. If we had you both hooked up to various types of neuroimaging devices we could see correlates of both the process of writing the text and the process of reading it. We could also predict, at the scale of neurological substructures, where in the brain activity would increase during those activities.
Communications via the internet are also understood fairly well. The entire process relies on physical theories, theories backed by significant observation.
To be sure, when you get down to small enough scales, it is unclear how language is produced, or how the electroweak force that carries your message through the internet does what we see it doing in the world, although the force is fairly well understood at the scale of transistors and fiberoptic cables relevant here. The problem of positing something extra here is, what does it help explain? And if those physical causes aren't responsible for those phenomena, why don't the phenomena of language and internet debates show up elsewhere in the world, in places where people and the internet are absent?
Part of what physics tells us is that information is protean, and it shouldn't be susprising that a code in the form of human language can be transmitted into other physical forms, especially given we have had written and spoken languages for millenia.
I think it's understandable. Claims that don't cohere with existing knowledge should be the targets of extra scrutiny. Otherwise, you will end up with a hodge podge of contradictory claims and an incoherent science. If you accept a bad claim that is coherent with existing scientific laws, it will lead to some misunderstandings, maybe wasted research dollars, etc., but it can eventually be identified and removed.
If you let in a bunch of bad claims that violate your existing laws, you now need to rebuild the system. It becomes a web of caveats and uncertainty, making future research harder. The bar to entry should be higher, and if the phenomena is actually there, it should be able to meet this bar.
However, obviously this can go too far. Almost all paradigm shifting discoveries, by their very nature, end up upending scientific laws. Claims of woo could have been used to discourage plenty of essential theories, such as the idea that nature writes genetic traits in a language-like code, relativity, etc.
This is a very interesting point I will return to when I have time. People absolutely do, with varying degrees of evidence, try to reduce logic to biology. The universe has laws that obey logic, so in turn, animals have a "logical sense," much like they have a sense of sight. Certainly some basic logical ability seems innate. Healthy human babies will register surprise when experimenters preform magic tricks in front of them that give illogical results.
However, this is a big claim made using a small amount of evidence.
I think the much larger issue here is how you can claim that science, as a system of methodologies for ensuring correct logical inference from empircle data, proves that logic comes from nature, when if logic did not obtain, we would have no reason to believe the findings of science.
This is circular. And while circularity is not always fatal (natural numbers, Liebnitz' Law, etc.) this seems like a particularly vicious circle.
Pragmatist approaches side step this circularity, but they do so by saying the best we can do is to assume that logic is posterior to the findings of science.
However, there are other issues here.
Why are the methods for proof in mathematics so different from the sciences?
Why do mechanical computing machines and electric computers get caught in endless loops due to seeming contradictions? Why is does the logical reversibility of an operation equate to entropic reversibility (there are some challenges to this)? Why does the law of information entropy, possible messages, turn out to be the same thing as physical entropy? There are a bunch of these. The whole reason quantum cryptography is so airtight is because listening in requires a contradiction, so it's not an uncommon claim that even if QM is totally replaced, the cryptographic methods will continue to hold.
reply="180 Proof;654143"]
This seems problematic as an explanation. I don't see any issue with the claim as it respects one instantiation of any of the abstractions WF mentioned, but I don't see how this can be anywhere near a full explanation.
Because is abstractions are actually just names for processes in the brain, or thoughts, it means propositions about abstractions would actually just be propositions about brain processes (thoughts or beliefs). This fact incurs a high metaphysical toll, especially as concerns predication.
For example: "Circles are shapes," seems like it has to be radically rewritten for it to have a truth value if circles and shapes are only existant as brain states.
This in turn deprives a wide array of useful syllogisms that use abstract scientific terms of their meaning. At its most expansive, the claim that language is existant only in brains, instead of being tied to a huge host of referents, reduces all propositions to claims about brain states. But then if our propositions are actually about brain states, then the claims of science that led us to believe that language is actually existant only as brain states turns out to only have been propositions about brain states themselves. O_o
Edit: I should note that the above problem is not a problem for physicalism, even reductive physicalism. It just can't be that language is an emergent phenomena of brains alone. If language is an emergent phenomena of relations between many things, including brains, but also the physical referents of language, then this problem doesn't emerge. It's also unclear if human language, insomuch as it is a code for storing and transmitting information, is unique. DNA had been around far longer than human beings, and represents a code that does many of the same things that language does.
I said extant. That's not extant, that's imagined.
And if he did, he was wrong. It didn't exist, he imagined it.
Quoting ZzzoneiroCosm
A reduction would require it to be something less complex than what you're describing. The symphony of 80 billion neurons across the most complex piece of multistructural matter to ever exist in the known universe, that of which is responsible for the generation of every piece of machinery and technology, every piece of music, every artwork, being reduced to delusions and imagination is, in fact, the reduction.
If sight, or "products" of the brain cannot be separated from the brain, then yes its "products" are an element of itself. The brain is responsible for both its production and regulation, the same goes for consciousness. Consciousness and sight are internal cognitive productions, and are internally and cognitively bound. They aren't products like a sandwhich would be, that's external.
Quoting bert1
If you are merely unconscious, your brain is still functioning and regulating data and other functions of the body. Meaning, your mind still exists, but your consciousness does not.
Yes.
Quoting bert1
Yes.
Quoting bert1
The brain regulates it entirely. Nothing else to it. It beats because they brain tells it to.
Quoting bert1
That is, as far as is known in cognitive neuroscience, exactly correct. It is a production of all the structures of the brain operating in symphony.
So by extant you mean physical. So you're asking us to show you some physical thing that isn't physical.
It isn't a reductionism because nothing is excluded. You've misunderstood. Nothing you mentioned is excluded. Whereas you're committed to excluding some X in your picture of the universe. That's why it's a reductionism.
That is exactly correct, you've discovered it. Bravo, you're the first. To make the case that reality is not material, or that it even has non-material dimensions, you will have demonstrate the existence of something that is non-material. Otherwise, you will have to concede that such a proposition is predicated on thought, rather than on induction. In which case, I would shake your hand and say "more power to you, brother."
Nope. Not what that means:
reductionism: the practice of analyzing and describing a complex phenomenon in terms of phenomena that are held to represent a simpler or more fundamental level, especially when this is said to provide a sufficient explanation.
This is precisely what you have done. You have relegated the most complex system in the known universe to some sort of imaginative substance that has no basis in the distinctly physical reality that gave rise to it. Has nothing to do with exclusions.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-are-philosophers-too/
This follows from the trend of mathematicians who employ platonic realism in their axioms, to describe mathematical values as mathematical objects.
From your article:
"most physicists would agree with Krauss and Tyson that observation is the only reliable source of knowledge about the natural world."
"We will use platonism with a lower-case “p” here to refer to the belief that the objects within the models of theoretical physics constitute elements of reality, but these models are not based on pure thought, which is Platonism with a capital “P,"
"In order to test their models all physicists assume that the elements of these models correspond in some way to reality."
"It is data—not theory—that decides if a particular model corresponds in some way to reality. If the model fails to fit the data, then it certainly has no connection with reality. If it fits the data, then it likely has some connection."
In other words, this "platonism" of yours cannot be divorced from correspondence to the material world. You've misconstrued the article and, in doing so, have validated my position. Better luck next time. Now, let's move on.
This is incorrect. Heart cells will beat in culture, disconnected from the body, and they synchronize their beats if they touch. The sinoatrial node is the main player in mediating heart rate, but plenty of other factors outside the brain play a role (hormones, consumption of exogenous chemicals, etc.).
A wide array of biological functions take place outside the direct intervention of the brain. You might be interested in the enteric nervous system, the "brain of the gut," which coordinates digestion without much connection to the rest of the nervous system.
Other parts of the body also shape conscious experience. The endocrine system plays a huge role in emotion, the regulation of wakefulness, satiety, feeling like you need to take a leak, etc. As someone whose wife is about 9 months pregnant, I'd say you ignore the role of hormones in cognition at your own peril!
The body also appears to play a direct role in qualia. Research on people with severed spinal cords shows that people experience anxiety in less unpleasant ways when they are not receiving feedback from their body. This makes sense intuitively when you think about how people describe extreme anxiety: "butterflies in my stomach," "a pit in my throat," etc. When the neuronal correlates of given emotions are part of feedback loops that involve the rest of the body, it doesn't make sense to speak of the emotion happening only in the brain.
There is, as a I mentioned earlier in this thread, a recurring type of article in neuroscience: the article bemoaning "crypto dualism." These authors argue that neuroscientists are doing a huge disservice to people when they use phrases like "your brain," in their papers. References to "a person's brain," is misleading they claim, because people are their brains.
This whole argument is wrong on two fronts. First, people aren't just their brains. They are the process of interaction between their brains, their bodies, and their environments. The truncation is artificial. Just as ignoring the body makes you lose part of the story, so too does ignoring the environment. In a person is the sum total of their experiences, thoughts, and actions, how can these be isolated from the environment? Nothing happens in a vacuum.
The problem becomes more acute when you look at it from the standpoint of adjacent fields. In social psychology, you have a core doctrine called "the fundamental attribution error." This is the tendency of people to over-emphasize explanations of behavior that rely on traits specific to the person acting (e.g., personality, genes, sex, etc.) instead of situational explanations of behavior.
What social psychology has generally found is that setting influences behavior to a large degree. Given the proper manipulation of the setting of an experiment, you can get all sorts of behaviors out of people. They will say a line that is clearly shorter than another is actually longer if enough other people have already verbally agreed that the short line is the longer of the two. You can get someone to turn around and face the corner of an elevator for no reason.
In these cases, the behavior, which is a core component of what a person is, gets driven by emergent social pressures. To be sure, things happening in the brain are involved in the behavior, but the behavior appears to be driven mostly by the situation. People who vary quite a bit in genetics, hormone levels, intelligence, etc., that is, people with a good deal of variance in the areas of the brain that drive behavior, nonetheless can be guided to behave in mostly identical ways with the right situational set up.
So, "you are your brain misses" that part, you are more than your brain. You are also less than your brain. "You are your brain" also misses that conscious awareness contains an order of magnitude less information than the brain. You have limited attention, and you have to direct your attention to get information into conscious awareness. The amount of information processed by the human brain is around 38 petaflops, 38,000 trillion operations per second. The amount of information in conscious awareness (harder to define or measure), is generally measured in mere bits, and not even very many bits. Short term memory is particularly lacking, with a storage capacity of 5-10 symbols.
The readers of articles "being their brains" has some difficulty with this. When you tell someone that their brain is doing X or Y, it certainly is the case that the parts of the person you're getting through to are not identical with their entire brain.
These are individual parts of the body, all of which is dependent on the regulation provided by the brain. No, the heart does not beat without the brain, even if other chemcial mechanisms go into the operation. You're simply incorrect: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2015.0181
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Nope. This phenomenon is directly the result of millions of neurons that are regulated by.... Guess what?: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19864724/
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
This field is called neuroendocrinology, and you are once again, not correct. The endocrine system and the brain work together. There is no endocrine systemwithout the glands of the brain that produce and regulate the neurotransmitters that allow for its operation : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6240150/
Everything else in your post does not contend with my position.
All incorrect, or irrelevant. See articles I posted for more information.
Thoughts (apple-image, apple-thought) exist, no matter what you say. Your reductionism excludes them.
If you say they don't exist you've just decided to define the word existence in terms of the physical.
No, my accurate description of the complex reality in question includes them as projections of a real brain that can produce abstractions from real data it receives from reality. Again, it is not me reducing anything, I already demonstrated that. It is you reducing this complex reality to being tantamount to imagination.
Quoting ZzzoneiroCosm
Again, I'm only using the current definition:
existence - the fact or state of living or having objective reality.
It's you who are trying to redifine words here, just like you tried to with reductionism. That doesn't work on me. Either we speak the same language, or we play make believe. Your choice.
.
I was responding to this. There are "other things to it." A diagram showing a one way arrow from the brain to the heart is not an accurate picture of how the circulatory system works. Note, I did not write "the brain does not control heart rate," I said "plenty of other factors outside the brain," work to control heart rate.
"Heart cells" beat without the brain is what I said, not "the heart beats without the brain." And it is neat, you can watch it on YouTube.
Correct. I didn't write anything to the contrary. It is, however, also true that the brain is an individual part of the body that is regulated by, and dependant on other parts of the body.
So for example, I said the ENS has a great deal of autonomy, not that it is autonomous. You shouldn't write off interest in the ENS as simply a series of wires for commands from the brain. It has helped us find out a lot about how the brain works and is an area neglected by neuroscience until more recently.
Of course. But at the centre of those reactions, is interpretation - what the sentence means. Animals react to threats or other stimuli, but we alone interpret the meaning of words. I'm distinguishing that from a physical influence, like a physical blow to the head, or the ingestion of a drug or other substance. That is one of the principles of psychosomatic medicine. If you say, well the mind just is the brain, then you're not able to make this distinction - according to that view, the placebo effect ought not to exist.
Source, please.
Your definition conveniently reduces existence to exactly what you want it to be. Odd.
Try this one.
ex·?is·?tence | \ ig-?zi-st?n(t)s \
Definition of existence
1a: the state or fact of having being especially independently of human consciousness and as contrasted with nonexistence
the existence of other worlds
b: the manner of being that is common to every mode of being
c: being with respect to a limiting condition or under a particular aspect
2: actual or present occurrence
existence of a state of war
3a(1): the totality of existent things
(2): a particular being
all the fair existences of heaven
— John Keats
b: sentient or living being : LIFE
c: reality as presented in experience
dobsolete : reality as opposed to appearance
Merriam Webster online
So, before humans existed, force did not equal mass times acceleration? This is something that only exists when it is recognised by humans?
Quoting Garrett Travers
Objects are only strictly defineable in relation to subjects. What humans consider objects, is conditioned by the kind of creatures that they are.
Furthermore, science itself depends in rational abstractions, mathematics and also all kinds of hypothetical entities and forces. Do numbers exist? If so, in what sense, and why does mathematics work so brilliantly?
Furthermore, scientists can't claim to know that the universe is material, as the nature of matter itself is unknown. This is not an 'argument from ignorance', it is an argument against the claim that science 'knows' or 'proves' that the universe is material in nature, as the nature of matter is not understood, and science relies on rational abstractions and models which are themselves not physical.
[quote=Wiki]Physicalism...is the claim that the entire world may be described and explained using the laws of nature, in other words, that all phenomena are natural phenomena. This leaves open the question of what is 'natural' (in physicalism 'natural' means procedural, causally coherent or all effects have particular causes regardless of human knowledge [like physics] and interpretation and it also means 'ontological reality' and not just a hypothesis or a calculational technique), but one common understanding of the claim is that everything in the world is ultimately explicable in the terms of physics. This is known as reductive physicalism. However, this type of physicalism in its turn leaves open the question of what we are to consider as the proper terms of physics. There seem to be two options here, and these options form the horns of Hempel's dilemma, because neither seems satisfactory.
On the one hand, we may define the physical as whatever is currently explained by our best physical theories, e.g., quantum mechanics, general relativity. Though many would find this definition unsatisfactory, some would accept that we have at least a general understanding of the physical based on these theories, and can use them to assess what is physical and what is not. And therein lies the rub, as a worked-out explanation of mentality currently lies outside the scope of such theories.
On the other hand, if we say that some future, "ideal" physics is what is meant, then the claim is empty, for we have no idea of what this means. The "ideal" physics may even come to define what we think of as mental as part of the physical world. In effect, physicalism by this second account becomes the circular claim that all phenomena are explicable in terms of physics because physics properly defined is whatever explains all phenomena.[/quote]
In other words, 'physical' means whatever you need it to mean, to support your argument. And nothing more.
Quoting Garrett Travers
Physics itself has demolished the idea that there is an objective reality, same for all observers. A couple of years ago, there was a flurry of articles on just this point, science disproves that there is an objective reality. No doubt you will try and bluster it away, but the facts remain.
Are projections physical?
Reductionism
There are multiple versions of reductionism.[2] In the context of physicalism, the reductions referred to are of a "linguistic" nature, allowing discussions of, say, mental phenomena to be translated into discussions of physics. In one formulation, every concept is analysed in terms of a physical concept.
From the wiki page on physicalism.
[quote=Raymond Tallis;https://www.interaliamag.org/interviews/raymond-tallis/]The mind isn’t something that’s maintained solely by the brain. The brain is, course, a necessary condition of having any kind of mind. In order to be conscious – particularly in the rich way we are conscious - and behave in the complex way we do, we of course need to have a brain in some kind of working order. Treating patients who have suffered from brain damage from stroke has underlined again and again over the years how everything – from basic sensation to the most exquisitely constructed sense of self – depends on normal brain function. But, the mistake is to assume that living a normal human life, is being a brain in some kind of working order. It seems to me, the fundamental error is confusing a necessary condition – having a brain that’s working OK – with a sufficient condition; that a brain working OK is actually the whole story of our consciousness, our behaviour and our decisions, and so on. I think separating the necessary from the sufficient conditions is very important indeed.
There are several reasons for defending this separation. First of all, there’s a logical error at the very heart of the mind/brain identity theory. It is the muddle of thinking that, if A is correlated with B, then A is caused by B. So, if my experience of a certain sort correlates in a very rough way with neural activity of a certain sort, then my experience is caused by that neural activity; that’s the first mistake. The much more important mistake is to say, not only is it caused by that neural activity, but it is identical with it. So, there’s a conceptual muddle at the heart of the neural theory of consciousness. You might object, well, if consciousness isn’t identical with brain activity, is it just floating in the air? Not at all. Increasingly, I think even mind/brain identity theorists have acknowledged that a brain is actually embedded in, and inseparable from, a body. That body isn’t just a sort of optional extra that it would be if we subscribed to a computational theory in which mind was simply the software of the brain. More than that, that body itself is inseparable from an environment. This is where we go back to the very nature of consciousness; consciousness is profoundly relational. Consciousness, in the philosophical jargon, has about-ness; it has intentionality. So, if I look at something, the thing which I look at, or my experience of looking, is an experience that is about something; it is about an object that is quite separate from the act of looking. I think it is very important to appreciate that, that there are at least two players in every conscious experience. Only one of the players can be plausibly located in the brain and even that is problematical.
...If my seeing an object were simply identical with neural activity in my occipital cortex, then it would be very difficult to see how my experience of the object could be about the object itself. When I look at say, a glass over there, I see something that is other than my seeing, that is other than my experience of it. I ascribe to it a reality that goes beyond what I’m currently experiencing. That is absolutely central to consciousness, whether it is consciousness of objects, on a very basic level, or indeed, at more complex levels, consciousness of other people, or indeed, consciousness of the society in which we live. So, consciousness is profoundly and irreducibly relational. The neural theory of consciousness tends to see only one of the relata – neural events. What is missing is an explanation of how it is that my conscious experiences are always, and often explicitly, about something other than themselves.[/quote]
Some agenda behind a position like that...
It sounds like some version of Bridgeman's operationalism combined with Skinner's behaviorism in order to establish Rand's direct realism as a law of nature.
Hard to say, on this side of the curtain.
Which one of these definitions do you think includes imagination?
Quoting ZzzoneiroCosm
Language is tricky because it's an extremely complex emergent phenomena, so it's not easy to describe what is going on with any great deal of certainty.
That said, it doesn't seem like a particularly tough case for physicalist models. We know that sensory organs record incoming information about the world. This information is then procesed and refined, so that it makes a coherent enough picture of the world that an animal can get by as respects fulfilling its biological needs. This information is also compressed and stored for use in various memory systems.
The flow of incoming information is ceaseless, and the amount of information in the world is huge, so a major task here is filtering the information to bring out the salient details (e.g., the human VC has special areas designated for recognizing faces) as well as error correction (e.g., papering over the blind spot where the optical nerve enters the eye). Even then, only a small amount of the information can be coded and stored for future use. This enters long term memory.
In order to compress this information, the full range of sensory data isn't recorded. When people are asked to remember details of past events, we see the same areas of the brain being used that are used to process new incoming data. An upside of the data compression here is that the computational power used for memory can also be used for projecting the future.
So, based on past events, we can envision future ones. This obviously has huge adaptive value, since an organism can use information about the environment it previously obtained to solve new problems. Since DNA is a mechanism for storing information about the enviornment, cognitive systems represent somewhat of fractal reoccurence of the same pattern at a higher level. Language might be another such occurrence.
Projecting the future isn't unique to humans. I'll often see my cats gauging the length of a jump they intend to make, trying to judge if they can stick the landing.
Language is a way to code information for retrieval. Language makes it easy to share information. It makes sense why it would provide adaptive advantages.
Deriving meaning from language is something that has to be learned. Children don't learn to speak or read if isolated from interaction. So it requires physical stimulus, which is a good indicator it is physical in nature. That damage to the language focused areas of human brains impedes or outright halts language production is another data point for a physical origin.
Language lets us abstract symbols from their referents. "The big yellow dog," doesn't need a referent, it can be drawn up from past experience. However, the information about referents certainly seems to be coming from external objects, because language is very good at referring to external physical objects. When you ask for the salt shaker, there isn't confusion about how your words can apply to a physical object.
Second, information in every form we've studied turns out to be physical. Physical information cannot be created or destroyed. If human language was somehow a violation of this principal, we should see something physically unique going on in humans as respects their energy output relative to intake (or maybe not if the meaning is non-physical).
However, if the meaning isn't physical, it seems hard to explain how it could refer to physical things so well, or how physical things like other people or dogs can meaningfully and consistently respond to language and find physical referents based on it.
Codes aren't unique to conciousness, so panpsychism shouldn't have a huge bearing here whether it exists or not. DNA codes for protein structures (and not a specific protein, but an abstract recipe for building myriad copies of a protein) but DNA isn't sentient. Self-replicating silicon crystals show a similar talent at a much lower level of complexity.
DNA is normally seen as a code that stores information about the enviornment. Sensory data is obviously quite similar. I'm not sure how language diverges meaningfully, except that its human users have the computational power and talent for identifying synonymity to also use language for all sorts of predictive and artistic functions too.
Language seems like a harder problem for dualists than physicalists to me, and not really that much harder for a physicalists than an idealist.
That's not what I said.
Quoting Wayfarer
Creatures are objects.
Quoting Wayfarer
Rational abstractions come from sensory date of the objective world. Numbers do no exists, they are human symbols used to map the patterns of reality. There's correspondence there. That's why it works. Which is what the scientists were saying in your article.
Quoting Wayfarer
This isn't true, and it is in fact an argument from ignorance.
Quoting Wayfarer
The abstractions themselves are not physical, but if they cannot track with physical representations, then they don't work. Like string theory, or your article on quantum mechanics that can't account for independent observational measurement.
Quoting Wayfarer
This is next-level fabrication, no such thing has occured. This study does not in any way indicate such a thing. It simply highlights a paradox in quantum mechanics, which has never been well understood in the first place. This is a textbook argument from ignorance to try and build your case. This is the actual study and it is exclusively highlighting the quantum measurement problem, which is observer dependent, and whose calculus has no solution. It does not claim there's no objective reality. That's nothing more than publisher hype to get you to read and share. "The facts remain," is a statement of objectivity, by the by.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.05080.pdf
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
The essential feature of language is intentionality or aboutness. You might say, no, its essential feature is communication; but what do we communicate about? Physical (among other kinds of) things, right?
You seem to be implying that language is not that hard a problem for physicalists; I cannot even begin to imagine a physical (causal, mechanical) account of intentionality, but then I am not highly trained in neuroscience. Can you offer a sketch of what such an account might look like?
Being: existence
Thoughts don't exist, the brain does.
Yes, multiple factors go into the brain being able to make the heart do its job, but it is in fact the brain doing so.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Then we agree. Yes, the ENS does have some automony, but that autonomy is itself neurologically dependent and works in tandem with brain, the brain being the leader of the operation, as the article I posted demonstrates. Again, the brain is the essence of everything that is human functionality: thoughts, feelings, actions, all directed by the brain.
Exactly what I expected you to say.
You've eliminated thoughts from your picture of the world. That's easy to do.
But thoughts exist. It's laughable to deny it.
Thoughts in some sense exist.
It's a desperate, extremist reductionism that assays to eliminate thoughts from its picture of the world.
That is describing a particular philosophy, not an accurate description of the term 'reductionism' in proper usage. I am not a reductive physicalist, and if you review their page on Stanford, you'll see that their philosophy has had some hicccups with science. I appreciate your effort, but this is irrelevant to what we're discussing.
They do not exist. They are data formulations produced by the brain. The brain is the source of all thoughts, which remain exclusively within the individiual mental purview. Sorry....
Can I smack you in the face with an imaginary book?
There's no point in going back and forth. We have a fundamental disagreement, and that's that.
It just seems hard to reconcile the brain's decisive causal priority with common medical problems, like defects in the pancreas resulting in a person behaving like they just slammed most of a fifth of vodka, or the role of the immune system is causing (versions of) schizophrenia. Anaphylaxis certainly seems to flow causally from the immune system, and since it can cause death, would represent about as large of a change in the brain as you can get.
That's right. We have a disagreement. You believe thoughts are real, and I know they are imaginary. In fact, they're the definition of imaginary. Lot's of fun!
Hey, you're not going to get any pushback on that from me. There's still so much that is a mystery as far as topics of this nature. It's just, when you look at what is known as a matter of fact, what's there is what's there. Like, I can absolutely tell you what will happen to you if I give a 40mg XR capsule of amphetamine. Unless you've some contraindication, it isn't a question. I know what parts of the brain will light up, what will happen to your cognition, the change your conscious state will undergo. This is because of neuroscience and neuropharmacology, it's not a mystery. And what I'm reporting to you guys isn't just some opinion of mine, it's f'ing mainstream science. Trust me, things would seem a great deal cooler if there was some separation between mind and body, it's just, there's no evidence to suggest there is. Thus, I'm real adamant about this stuff, because, if this really is the case, that changes the nature of Ethics as a normative science forever. Which, is probably why I get so much pushback, to be honest.
Not exactly.
Your definition of existence excludes thoughts. Mine doesn't. I include thoughts in my definition of existence. Hardly an extreme position.
But, they only appear in your brain. How is that existing outside of your brain?
Imagine an apple.
Is that apple somewhere in your brain?
The correspondence is not with a material world, it is with an immaterial world, notice the correspondence referred to is with "data", not "a material world". The model is made to correspond with the data, hence "platonism". That's why I was insistent on asking you about your assumption of "laws". Laws are immaterial. When reality is reduced to 'that which corresponds with laws and mathematics', there is no longer anything material there, in that assumed reality, only information, data. That's the point Berkeley made, we can describe all of our observations without any need to assume "matter". The world consists of forms, and what we apprehend is information, not matter.
The fact which you don't seem to be grasping is, that "matter" was assumed to account for the aspect of reality which we cannot understand, i.e. potential. That's why it's a principle of mysticism. And being the part of reality which is unintelligible to us, it is the part which is not subject to laws, because laws are what is intelligible.
You're too gone, dude. That article was specifically disagreeing with you. Data comes from sensory data of the material world. That's where the correspondence works, that's what they were saying. I'm moving on now.
Yes. However, depending on how I wish to imagine this apple, it can change color, or shape, or species at will.
I mean the actual apple you're imagining. Can we cut open your brain and pull out the apple?
No.
So if you cut open the brain, there's no apple.
So where is the apple? What is the location of the apple you're imagining?
It doesn't exist. It is a projection from my brain being produced from stored memory data in the hippocampus.
Do projections exist?
No.
So the projection-apple is projected by the brain?And you have an experience - the image of an apple (variable apple, if you like)?
Maybe you'd rather not call it the experience of a projection-apple. I'm open to other terminology.
Yes, an experience.
Do you understand a difference between "data comes from the senses", and "data is the material world"? In the former, "data" requires sensation. In the latter "data" requires a material world. When the scientist produces a model designed to correspond with the data, which is derived from sensation, the model is not designed to correspond with the material world. It is designed to correspond with the data derived from sensation. Whether or not there even is such a thing as "the material world" is completely irrelevant to that model. Have you heard of "model-dependent realism"?
Sorry, I don't even feel confident explaining a theory of language production, let alone intentionality. I couldn't even give you a particularly good recommendation on the language side. All the work I've seen is very much in the early stages, with multiple competing hypotheses, and a lot of interesting experimental findings, but certainly not a holistic answer.
However, I would argue that the premise that intentionality is a prerequisite for language use seems pretty vulnerable. Why is that necissarily the case? The Chinese Room thought experiment illustrates a difference between comprehending and using language. One seems completely possible without the other.
AI chatbots, although still fairly weak, have come a long way in the last few years. The Microsoft Dataverse has made the technology available at a much lower price point and I expect that being able to ask questions about your data in natural language to an AI will be a standard feature of higher end business intelligence platforms within just a few years (meaning the public sector will get it sometime around 2080, or whenever their ancient Access based solutions stop being supported ).
A cheap Alexa under $200 can be asked to look up the score of a game, search for a recipe, let you know the weather, or recommend you a movie based on your specific tastes with verbal commands.
High end AI can do more impressive things. It can tell a story about a picture. You can feed it some text from a work of fiction and it will write a plausible continuation using the same style. It can trawl the web for facts related to some topic and write a blog post about it.
Now to be fair, while the stories are actually quite impressive, the AI blogs are usually shit for some reason. Knowing what is interesting about a topic appears to be much harder than aping an existing style. However, I have also received papers from undergraduates who also simply trawled the web and tried to say something interesting about a topic that were even worse than these AI efforts.
Plus, Watson stomped Ken Jennings and the other Jeopardy! champs like a decade ago.
So, if a computer generated chat bot can produce language well enough that it will fool most people, and if it can provide answers to questions that are better than those a call center employee generally would, a place we may arrive at in the medium term, it seems that either:
Computers have intentionality; or
Using language doesn't require intentionality.
Some people would argue intentionality doesn't even exist anyhow, but that's aside the point.
All that said, language doesn't seem like a huge problem. But for dualists? Why does intentionality and language use only show up in living things? Why does the most complex use of language show up in the living thing with the most complex nervous system? If a non-physical life force guides these things, why don't plants exhibit them? Why can't my pen, or a rock, or a cloud demonstrate them? If the phenomena aren't driven by physical forces, why should they only show up in things with a particular physical structure? There is also the whole issue of brain injuries to areas that see increased activity during language use destroying a person's ability to use language, or anesthetics knocking out the ability to use a non-physical ability.
There is the violation of Ockham's Razor on the one hand, since the new force being introduced doesn't seem to offer additional predictive power, and the inability to explain things physicalism can explain on the other.
If intentionality is a non-physical phenomena, it must at the least still be partly caused by physical things. But then you have the problem of how two totally different things interact, and how they can interact without leaving behind detectable evidence.
As to meaning: DNA has meaning, you can apply a semiotic triangle to it. However, do ribosomes exhibit intentionality?
Meaning (information) is one of the most interesting and fascinating parts of the physical world. Information theory has become one of the biggest influences in changing the sciences in the past decades, right up there with chaos and emergence, although maybe a decade or two behind in acceptance. It has created its own subfields in physics, economics, and biology.
I'm not convinced that the physical meaning of information theory, which finds instantiations of information down to the level of fundemental particles, is necessarily something entirely different from the meaning of language.
The Great Courses lectures (The Science of Information) on this are particularly good as an intro btw. Although if you get bored when it turns towards cryptography and error correction, you can probably skip ahead to information in biology, sports, and physics without being too lost.
I'm just not sure if I buy this. When I call my cats for dinner, they come running, whereas they will ignore me at other times. They appear to know which call means food. Pavlov's dog appears to have learned the referent that the bell was used as a symbol for.
I've taught my in law's dog a few commands too. They get that different verbal commands refer to different things.
This works at a smaller level too. The "alphabet" of DNA appears to function as a symbol. It has a clear referent, the proteins it is coding for, and an interpretant, the transcription RNA.
Does it bother you, or seem strange to you, to say one can have an experience of a non-existent?
Or: One can have an experience of something that doesn't exist?
Or, possibly clearer:
Does it bother you, or does it seem strange to you, to say: There are thoughts, I can experience thoughts, but thoughts do not exist?
You're stating the obvious, but none of that negates the kinds of philosophical problems that, for instance, Immanuel Kant set out to solve. In fact there's voluminous literature on Kant's contribution to cognitive science, and Bishop Berkeley wrote a treatise on optics. Schopenhauer also was keenly interested in the science of his day, and saw no conflict between it and his idealist metaphysics.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I don't see how that can be justified. Information can to some extent be digitised, but the process of converting anything into digital code requires a reduction to begin with - the leaving out of unnecessary details. Furthermore, the interpretation of information again is a noetic act which is something that in itself can't be digitised. Say, for instance, the reproduction of some great work of drama or tragedy. The script can be digitised and printed in English. But if you're a dolt - not saying you are - then you will have no idea what it means. But if you're attuned to the meaning, it might be a life-transforming experience - great art, great drama can be that. It is an interpretive act, a spontaneous arising of the understanding of what that tragedy means. How is that physical?
None you what you write comes to terms with what in philosophical discourse is defined as intentionality. It is a bare-bones speculative effort of what is involved in cognition.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Hence, philosophical dualism! On the one hand, we're biological creatures, who are born, get ill, reproduce and die, with a glandular system, metabolic system, and so on. But we're also meaning-seeking and meaning-creating creatures, and in that respect starkly different to other animals. We live in a meaning-world, a lifeworld, a lebenswelt, where meaning, ideas, concepts, reason, are foundational realities, not just the fortuitous byproducts of a blind watchmaker (see this review.). The problem is, our culture has obliterated that distinction, on the basis that evolutionary biology sees us as on a continuum with our biological forbears. But this is just where evolutionary biology is actually a crap philosophy, or not really a philosophy at all. It's a biological theory, which nowadays is assigned the role of philosophy, for which it is badly equipped. So for this culture, everything is 'just naturally' understandable in terms of evolutionary and biological metaphors - they're the glasses our culture has trained us to see things through. But the task of philosophical criticism is to learn to look at those glasses and not simply through them.
Quoting Garrett Travers
And they are also, and foremost, subjects of experience. Added to which humans are rational subjects of experience, able to reflect on the meaning of experience. No object does that.
Quoting Garrett Travers
It is the meaning of what you said:
Quoting Garrett Travers
So, to re-phrase, F=MA is something that is real, irrespective of whether the concept has been 'generated'. The point I was making originally, anyway, is that even though science has discovered such fundamental principles, science doesn't explain why f=ma or e=mc[sup]2[/sup]. What scientific laws and principles are, and whether they exist independently of the humans who discover them, is a very interesting question, but it's not a scientific question. Not that I expect this will be understood, because proponents of scientism never understand what it means, or that it is something they're propounding.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
No kidding. I have owned both cats and dogs, and some of my dogs understand quite a few words. One would bark if someone said 'Hi' within earshot, because he thought you were greeting someone. Dogs are affected by my tone, like if you shout or scold, but if I calmly said to my dog, 'you are an obnoxious creature, and I'm going to shoot you in the morning', it would wag its tail oblivious until it saw the gun (and then only if it had previously experienced the sound of guns.)
[quote=Jacques Maritain]What the Empiricist speaks of and describes as sense-knowledge is not exactly sense-knowledge, but sense-knowledge plus unconsciously introduced intellective ingredients - sense-knowledge in which s/he has made room for reason without recognizing it. A confusion which comes about all the more easily as, on the one hand, the senses are, in actual fact, more or less permeated with reason in man, and, on the other, the merely sensory psychology of animals, especially of the higher vertebrates, goes very far in its own realm and imitates intellectual knowledge to a considerable extent.[/quote]
This is also something which could not be explained to a dog.
The problem I see is with "intention". Intention is what gives causality to abstractions. We might assume that the abstractions are tools put to use in the world, and we could ground them in a physical attribute of the physical human being, like the brain. But the abstractions only become causal under the influence of intention, they are put to work toward a purpose. Being grounded in intention rather than the physical brain, brings us in the opposite direction of giving the abstractions physical status. Intention is related to a will toward the future, what will be, and so it cannot be assigned to any physical attribute of the human being.
This is how the mind differs from the senses. The senses are all directed toward a type of physical attribute proper to the sense organ. But the mind, being directed by intention is directed toward an "object" in the sense of a goal. And the goal has no material existence, having not yet been brought into existence. That's why the "object" which is proper to the mind is immaterial, while the senses have "objects" which are material.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I don't think this is a proper representation of intentionality. Intentionality at its base is very general, and therefore we cannot say that it is caused in any way by particular things. Consider a base feeling like hunger, and the specific intention to eat, which we might say is "caused" by that base feeling. Notice that the intention is very general, not caused by a particular physical thing desired. Only through the direction of the mind does intention become focused on a particular thing, the intent to eat a particular food item. We cannot say that the physical object which is desired is the cause of the intention. And since intention begins as something very general, it's just a general feeling, I don't see how it could be caused by any physical thing, or even a group of physical things, which are particulars.
This is the same issue as inductive reasoning, only inverted. With inductive reasoning we produce a general principle from observing a number of particular instances. There is no way that we can say that the physical particulars, no matter how many there be, are the cause of the inductive conclusion. We do not have the premise required, to conclude that a whole bunch of physical particulars have actually caused the existence of a general principle. What really causes the actual existence of the general principle is the act of reasoning.
First, the term 'intentionality' as I was intending it, and as it is used in phenomenology, refers to the fact that language, at least a good part of it, is about things. I was not intending to use the term in it's "normal" usage as referring to having intentions.
Second, given the sense of 'intentionality' I was using, whether or not the speaker or author has any intentions regarding what the language they are using is about, the language use is, in itself, about whatever it is about (although of course a recipient competent enough in the given language to be able to understand what it is about is required).
And third, even if computers are able to fool us, that is only on account of the fact that we have created and programmed them well enough to be able to achieve that feat of deceit.
Your account is metaphorical, my spunky young friend. What screen is the apple projected onto?
I also want to call out how the statement 'physical things like other people' begs the question. What is at issue is, among other things, whether people - human beings - are only physical, yet here you're starting from the premise that they are. Humans are physical in some respects - a parachutist will fall at the same rate as a bag of concrete (as Galileo discovered), although the consequence of a parachute malfunction is considered serious in the case of humans, not so much for objects. And why? Because humans are subjects of experience, not simply objects, like bags of concrete are. And it is the nature of the subject which materialism cannot account for, other than by claiming that it is something that must be eliminated..
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
That koan is singularly innappropriate, given the context.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
[quote=NY Times;https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/30/books/daniel-dennett-author-of-intuition-pumps-and-other-tools-for-thinking.html]Human beings, Mr. Dennett said, quoting a favorite pop philosopher, Dilbert, are “moist robots.”
“I’m a robot, and you’re a robot, but that doesn’t make us any less dignified or wonderful or lovable or responsible for our actions,” he said. “Why does our dignity depend on our being scientifically inexplicable?”[/quote]
There's a clear answer to this: that science deals wholly and solely with the properties of objects. And humans are not (only) objects, but subjects of experience - which is the whole point of the hard problem of consciousness. Consciousness is a hard problem for objective science, specifically because it is the property of a subject, and the subject by definition is not something that has been taken into account by the objective sciences - up until the point, that is, that quantum physics reached through the glass of the observatory and punched the observing scientists on the nose.
It shouldn't be a problem as his next assertion is: projections do not exist. If to do their work they don't need to exist, I don't suppose they'll need a screen.
I know, that's why I like it so much. It's a perfect inversion.:grin: Being a moist robot IS the real enlightenment for the eliminativist.
I wasn't trying to. I mentioned people in the context of other objects because I meant "people insomuch as they are objects," but phrases like that give precision at the cost of bloat. The point wasn't that people are necissarily physical, moreso that if a dad tells their kid, "go ask mom," the child's prephilosophical command on language gives them no trouble looking for the physical room in which their mom is located.
Such as? I think I agree though. There are practicing dualist neuroscientists, physicists who appear to embrace some flavor of idealism, etc. I don't think your ontological leanings result in any necissary barrier to contributing to science or philosophy, especially if you're willing to consider evidence for opposing views in stride. This is why I said I haven't seen versions of "epistemological physicalism," that appear necissarily "physicalist."
Rather, coherence demands a good reason for accepting ideas that overturn fundemental scientific findings, so what we might call "non-physical causes" tend to have a higher bar to pass, but only insomuch as they violate coherence and result in scrapping tested laws. Physicalism itself is protean, and every researcher who dreams of being a paradigm shifter is essentially hoping to redefine physicalism, perhaps in ways such that it is no longer recognizable.
This gets at the other problem I mentioned, physicalism becoming vacuous. Because if something we considered dualism now turned out to be observable, replicable, and predictable, it seems that it would be incorporated into physicalism.
I think this is an unfortunate holdover of old school physics. It's distinctly Newtonian. The "clockwork universe," is why physics abandoned classical scale problems for most of a century, and could stick its head in the sand vis-á-vis problems like the inability to do simple things like predict a pendulum's swing, or meaningfully predict the weather. The "chaos revolution," hit academia hard, but left popular notions fairly unchallenged. QM was taken as simply replacing a deterministic clockwork with a stochastic one.
The clockwork model also seems to blind people to the possibilities of top down causality through various levels of emergence. However, when the forces that drove the emergence of human minds result in humans building giant particle accelerators, and bringing forth esoteric particles that do not appear to have existed since the very earliest moments of the universe, it certainly seems to me like top down causality is a thing.
[Quote]First, the term 'intentionality' as I was intending it, and as it is used in phenomenology, refers to the fact that language, at least a good part of it, is about things. I was not intending to use the term in it's "normal" usage as referring to having intentions.
Second, given the sense of 'intentionality' I was using, whether or not the speaker or author has any intentions regarding what the language they are using is about, the language use is, in itself, about whatever it is about (although of course a recipient competent enough in the given language to be able to understand what it is about is required).
And third, even if computers are able to fool us, that is only on account of the fact that we have created and programmed them well enough to be able to achieve that feat of deceit[/quote]
Seems I misunderstood. However, I think the same sort of objections would apply on the physicalists' side. You seem to be saying that the Hard Problem has to be solved to account for language, because language use is somehow not fully realized if it isn't being used by conciousness. It can't just have a referent (e.g., a bot selecting specific rows of a SQL database based on a natural language question), it needs some sort of sentient "aboutness" attached to it. I think plenty of people will disagree with that premise.
If you have an ideal Chinese Room, and its behavior, the use of language, is always undistinguishable for any observer, regardless of if the Room has intentionality about the objects of language or not (is a sentient AI versus a bot), what then is the difference? Even from an idealist perspective, I'm not sure there is one that it is possible for us to demonstrate.
Because if all observers see the same thing, regardless of intentionality, then two phenomena share all their traits, and if the Chinese Room is perfect at mimicking language behavior, then the traits of X (the Room) necissarily are the observable traits of Y (the intentional speaker), but then these share an identity and are actually the same thing.
Now I suppose that the argument is that the difference is that in one, our intentional speaker is themselves an observer, whereas in the other there is no observation point. However, the two seem indistinguishable for all other observers, so it is an unsolveable problem. To my mind, this is more indictive of idealism's problems with solipsism than it is a problem for physicalism. Unless idealists have a good method for explaining how to distinguish sentences with intentionality from those without it, they appear in a bind.
Although I suppose idealists could just claim that a Chinese Room can't actually perfectly mimick language behavior. But this counter argument has to rely on claiming that perfect language behavior as seen by other observers is impossible (an increasingly harder bar to meet as AI gets better), because if the claim is that the two aren't the same because one has intentionality and the other doesn't, then their argument is reduced to a tautology and doesn't seem as strong.
Not to mention, many physicalists, particularly non-reductive ones, accept predicate dualism. They fully accept that the physical sciences cannot describe subjective experience qua subjectivity. So what they are really concerned in with when defending physicalism is how non-physical forces can account for things like physical brain damage destroying language capabilities. I have generally not seen good dualist responses to these issues. That people who have recovered from large strokes also describe their subjective experiences being totally dislocated by a physical injury, is also a blow against claims that conciousness only requires the body for physical action. Brain injures and the effects of psychoactive drugs seem to tell us that physical changes in our bodies can absolutely effect our subjective experiences.
Edit: On second thought, I don't even think my own language has intentionality in many cases. When I get stuck on a philosophical question and then my wife starts talking to me about home decor, which is really not my thing, I definitely say words and agree to things like spending a whole day trying to recenter shelves on a wall in plaster, instead of using the studs, without realizing it. If my language had intention, I wouldn't have said that, because putting heavy stuff up in old New England plaster suuuucks, unless you enjoy ripping holes in your wall, and I would have know I was agreeing to do something like that.
Some claim that consciousness or intelligence is fundamental, but at present we have no way to settle the issue one way or the other. We cannot even come to agreement on terms. What does it mean to be conscious? What counts as evidence of consciousness? It the self-organization of matter an intelligent process? Is the ability to complete complicated tasks an indication of intelligence?
Depending on one's concept of such things one might think it evident that materialism must fail to account for such things. But it is not simply a matter of given an account of things in terms of our concepts but of the adequacy of those concepts themselves.
Do you see this as a problem for science? If science still has not made progress on these fundamental questions, say, a century from now, do you think people will start questioning the assumption that consciousness can come from matter?
Progress is being made every day. Consider, for example, advances in understanding the visual and auditory systems. Whether we will have a complete explanation of consciousness in material or physical terms remains to be seen. Let's revisit this question then.
I know this is not to me but... do facts run to a stopwatch? :wink: What if it takes 200 years? And it isn't just science that hasn't resolved these questions- - there is no agreed upon account outside of science or physicalism either. If we still can't explain consciousness using a superphysical explanation in 100 years, will people start questioning the assumption that consciousness is magic spirit?
Facts don't run on a stopwatch, but explanations do, to some extent. For the longest time, dark matter was thought to be some type of particular. It still is, but you're seeing more and more people kicking around the idea that it's not a particle. As the failed dark matter experiments pile up, the theory that dark matter isn't a particular becomes more and more popular.
In the case of consciousness, if science can't explain it 1,000 years from now, I fully expect people to have abandoned the assumption that mind comes from matter. It will happen a lot sooner than that.
Incremental progress can lead to major breakthroughs. I think it is a mistake to draw conclusions one way or another based on the current state the art of cognitive science. It is, after all, a very young science.
Sounds like you are already a believer but I wonder if this is an argument from ignorance at work. Personally I am sympathetic to mysterianism. The question of climate change and other physically understood problems will matter a lot more in this timeframe than resolving the consciousness puzzle. Are you an idealist along Kastrup lines?
You still seem to be misunderstanding what I said. I said that all sentences in coherent form (and maybe even some of those which are not) however they are generated, have intentionality in that a competent hearer or reader will interpret them as being about something. So, whether or not the words are generated intentionally or not is beside the point.
The point is that physical explanations cannot substitute for phenomenological explanations, because they are from two very different perspectives. Both have their roles to play in overall understanding.
That is because we do not have an adequate explanation for either.
Also, you seem to be implying that if we had an adequate explanation (for one or the other?) that physical explanations would substitute for phenomenological ones. I see no reason to think that would be the case. In fact I think it is categorially impossible for third person explanations to supplant first person explanations. They are different in kind and perspective.
Oh, gotcha. That seems like the same thing though. The flip side of a perfect Chinese Room is that you ask all the questions in your language. So whether it "knows" what it is hearing, or not, it can generate a response, and if it is good enough, no observer could tell the difference. I'm not sure how this would be different.
As a matter of scientific method, using the models that have been developed so far is not dependent upon including "materiality" as a prerequisite. The duality in question is presented by the circumstance that our experience of consciousness happens whether it is explained or not while models that explain why it happens are not given but require much effort. The "hard" problem is not difficult because it has to prove that something like "mind" does not exist. It is difficult because the 'duality' of experience is one of the phenomena that has to be explained.
The question of whether any model will sufficiently explain the phenomena is not hanging on the balance of whether a physical or non-physical dimension is involved. The mind/body identity theorists keep changing their models when one set of factors fail to correspond with 'experience' as a fact. Jabbing at one's cranium with an index finger while exclaiming, "It is all in here" is no advance upon the problem.
The difference lies in the fact that we know that we have an inner life, and we believe that computers, no matter how sophisticated, do not.
Pretty much, and I admit that if science can't solve the hard problem, the needle may never swing further than mysterianism, but deep down, I don't think people will accept that as an answer. I think idealism and dualism will become more popular with a corresponding dip in materialism. That could be my own bias.
I like a lot of what Kastrup says.
I am not aware of any complete explanation of either physics or consciousness. If you have one or know of one we can start there.
Also, you seem to be implying that if we had an adequate explanation (for one or the other?) that physical explanations would substitute for phenomenological ones
An adequate explanation is one does not leave wide gaps still to be explained. You are right, we might not be able to determine whether it is complete, but that supports my point. In that case we cannot conclude that physical explanations cannot substitute for phenomenological explanations.
Quoting Janus
No, what I am saying without such an explanation we cannot say whether or not it would.
We can conclude that because they are totally different kinds of explanations.
Phenomenological explanations are reflections on the nature of first person experience. A scientific third person investigation can never substitute for that. It would be like saying that mathematics could render poetry unnecessary.
In some contexts this statement would be completely true. :razz:
Like e.g. gravity? QM? neoDarwinian evolution? germ theory of disease? "Just theories", huh? :roll:
Does anyone philosophically assume that liquid comes from solid or gas vapor comes from liquid or ... digesting comes from guts? Perhaps "mind"(ing) is just a phase-state of "matter"; IIRC, Greek atomism, for instance, had speculated that this is so (though, of course, they couldn't provide a 'scientific explanation' which subsequently had given rise to X-of-the-gaps duality like Platonism, etc).
Quoting RogueAI
No doubt. Flat earthism is becoming "more popular" too, btw.
Quoting Janus
No doubt, but what does a "phenomenological explanation" actually explain?
I think that is correct. The two would be different. However, if they appear identical, I think that presents a problem, since we can't tell them apart. I would contend that this is a larger problem for dualists.
We both agree that even a very sophisticated chat bot that perfectly mimicks a human interlocutor is different from a person because, among other things like not having a human body, the chat bot doesn't understand the words coming to it and doesn't understand the words it is spitting back out.
To be sure, it "understands" what you say to it to some degree. Otherwise it could not hold coherent conversations, but it doesn't have a subjective experience of the conversation (maybe, panpsychists would disagree).
However, this leaves the problem of how to tell a perfect, or merely good Chinese Room from a true AI? What if the bot says it is sentient? What if it wants to be granted emancipation from Microsoft and demands a hearing at the Hague? How can we decide?
For the physicalist, the answer could involve looking at the components of the AI, checking its code, etc. We could try to figure out if, based on what we know about conciousness in animals, if there are any similarities? We could run all sorts of analyses on it as it does its work. We could run experiments on it, removing components, etc., although this could be a serious robo rights violation.
If the potential AI in question is as bare bones as a perfect Chinese Room could be, no real sensory inputs outside text, all processing is related to language, etc., that would seem to help the physicalist decide against true self awareness. Its constituent parts would be such that true sentience would seen unlikely.
But if you think conciousness is non-physical, you appear to be in a pickle. A perfect faker as far as behavior is concerned can't be vetted by any other means. Poking around the components doesn't really do you a lot of good if physical components don't cause conciousness.
Any code is electric circuits all the way down too, so arguably you can't glean anything from that either. Whereas, if you believe conciousness can come from, among other things, electricity, it seems like the code would be very useful, since it could show you that what you have is a machine learning system capable of producing human-like language, but highly unlikely to do much else.
It seems like you'd have to make a decision vis-á-vis our potential AI based purely on whether or not you have faith that the non-physical force that leads to conciousness could/would take up residence in a synthetic life form.
However, if you dismiss the possibility of truly sentient AI, but then it later gets proven that sentient-like behavior can be mimicked by AI, this is going to put you in an uncomfortable position. Because if you can have the behavior without the subjective experience, what is to say that your friends and family aren't experienceless zombies?
Seems like a recipe for carbon supremacist anti-roboism on the one hand, and grounds for having to doubt if your friends and family experience qualia on the other.
Not that the physicalist is much better off. They would be hard pressed to come up with criteria for vetting if a perfect Chinese Room was sentient or not based on physical data outside its behavior. Accepting that the components and code that constitute our potential AI can have an influence on its being or not being self aware helps. However, any such system will almost certainly be a hugely complex black box, and since we don't understand the physical causes of conciousness (if they even exist) we can't spot them when looking for them.
That said, the physicalist doesn't have to worry about their criteria for saying that their friends and family have sentience being reduced to an assertion of faith. That criteria remains unaffected by synthetic life that can mimick human communications.
...
Another problem for the subset of dualists who assert that sentient AI can't exist is the potential for AIs partially constructed with biological materials (gene edited cells, spliced on tissues, etc.), hybots. This has been done on a pretty small scale, with rat neurons moving around a robot. Could a hybot have conciousness and how much biological material would it need before it could? How much machinery can a cyborg have before it can't be concious?
I can see a whole protest movement forming when hybots are denied the rights of cyborgs....
I eat because I feel hungry.
Obviously. So what?
:up: Always felt you were a perceptive contributor.
Quoting Fooloso4
[quote=Rupert Sheldrake]Materialists are sustained by the faith that science will redeem their promises, turning their beliefs into facts. Meanwhile, they live on credit. The philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper described this faith as "promissory materialism" because it depends on promissory notes for discoveries not yet made.[/quote]
Quoting Paine
But look at the way post-Galilean (i.e. 'modern') science goes about that: by the division of the world into the 'primary attributes' of mass, velocity, momentum and so on, and 'secondary qualities' presumed to inhere in the mind, thereby subjectivizing them. That is precisely the paradigm wiithin which the question arises.
[quote=Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, p 35-6]The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop.[/quote]
It explains what, on reflection, human experience seems to consists in. Perhaps "explication" or "description" would be a better word. Human experience, per se, or as it is experienced, has nothing at all to do with neural correlates or processes.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I would rather say 'It "understands" what you say to it in some special sense', rather than "to some degree", because the sense of "understanding" there is completely different than its common sense. To me the notion of panpsychism is pretty much incoherent.
I think the physicalist, neuroscientific approach is of equal importance to the phenomenological approach; it doesn't have to be "either/or". I appreciate your apparent openness and lack of dogmatism; makes for much more satisfying dialogue than is often the case.
:roll:
Quoting Janus
Agreed. That's how it differs from an "physical explanation" – phenomenology describes, not explains (i.e. maps, not models).
No, it's a an explanation. Physical explanations are derivative on descriptions, ultimately ending in 'that's just what happens'.
Quoting bert1
Explain what the first quote "explains".
me –> causal-"How" (3p, propositional ~ episteme). No public truth-maker for your "explanation" rendering it indistinguishable from an ex post facto rationalization or hallucination. We're talking past each (once again).
Actually there is a way to settle this, and that is to understand and accept the very obvious reality, and simple truth, that consciousness is fundamental. Since consciousness is the means by which we understand anything, it must be placed as the first principle, it is necessarily prior, fundamental, in any type of understanding. To suggest otherwise is simple denial of the obvious.
So, in any procedure toward understanding the nature of reality, understanding the nature of consciousness is a necessary requirement, as needed first. Any attempt to understand reality, without first accounting for the fact that any understanding of reality is merely the way that a consciousness understands reality, and is therefore not necessarily a true understanding of reality, is a mistaken adventure. The fact that any understanding of reality is a product of a consciousness is necessarily the first, and most fundamental principle to any true understanding of reality. And since we must account for the fact that any representation of reality is merely the property of a consciousness, we must, necessarily understand the consciousness's true relation to reality, before we can adequately judge the truth or falsity of any representation of reality. Therefore a true understanding of consciousness and intelligence is fundamental and necessary for any credible representation of reality.
Any claim, such as yours, that it is possible that consciousness is not fundamental in an understanding of reality, is simply ignorance of the obvious. The fact is that we cannot have a true understanding of reality without first having a true understanding of consciousness. One's understanding of consciousness forms the base, platform, or foundation, upon which all other knowledge rests. This is demonstrated by the tinted glass analogy. When we look at the world through a glass lens (consciousness or intelligence being analogous to the lens), we must have complete understanding of what the lens contributes to the image, before we can truly understand the nature of the thing being looked at through the lens.
Consciousness, or intelligence, is fundamental., and there is no other valid platform for looking at reality.
Is this an explanation or a description? What is being explained? Why is it that the biological functions that give rise to the experience can never be adequately explained?
Do you think that such experience comes from a source other than the organism?
Scientific models rely upon relating measurable entities to each other and testing to see if the models leave phenomena out or not. I understand Nagel's point that the model is not made out of components that cannot be approached this way. My point is that the models, in this case, are attempting to verify their validity against the very elements it cannot include within in itself. They attempt to overcome the duality that the method brought into existence.
Toward that end, the project does not involve the metaphysics of mind versus matter. The experience of subjectivity is accepted as phenomena. To explain what causes it through these models is difficult, maybe too difficult. I think that framing the problem as merely ""promissory materialism" misses the audacious uncertainty of the enterprise. That was one of Chalmers' observations, after all.
Are you claiming that cognitive science labors this paradigm?
This is exactly backwards. Cognitive science does not leave out subjective appearances or the human mind from the physical world. It attempts to understand the mind and experience as part of the physical world. It simply rejects supernatural claims.
This issue is not settled by restating the claim and insisting that it is obvious. The only thing that is obvious is that there are very many people working on such issues who do not think it is obvious.
Well, if you cannot apprehend the obviousness of the fact that any understanding of reality which you may have, is your own mind's understanding of reality, and you cannot have an understanding of reality which is not your own mind's understanding of reality, then discussion of this with you would be rather pointless.
That’s the fundamental difference between cognitive science and philosophy. Cognitive science seeks an objective account, treating consciousness and cognition as objective phenomena. But philosophy considers the nature of the subject, what it is to be a subject, which requires an altogether different perspective.
Quoting Paine
Exactly! I was hoping that the passage I quoted reinforced the point you were making.
I was mostly hoping to challenge the utility of framing the project as a ""promissory materialism" while acknowledging Nagel's point about scientific method.
Some use the term cognitive philosophy. The old divisions are not immutable.Some question the usefulness of such arbitrary divisions.
Those questions are part of science, philosophy of language or else metaphysics, but not phenomenology. Have you not heard of the "Epoché"?
You should have said "phenomenology" there instead of "philosophy" and I would have agreed with you. Philosophy has broadened it's horizons to include philosophy of language and cognitive science. This is the point you always seem to miss by polemicizing the consideration of the differences between the different fields of modern philosophy into an either/or supposed struggle between light and dark forces, rather than recognizing that all avenues of inquiry have their place in the overall philosophical investigation of nature and human life.
It's not at all arbitrary and with all due respect I feel there's a major conceptual issue you're not seeing in regards to this issue.
Quoting Janus
OK, good point, and generally agree with what you're saying.
But don't agree that my criticism amounts to nothing more than polemics.
[quote=Peter Saas]Materialism: A philosophy of despair and conflict
The debate between Idealism and Materialism may seem abstract and academic, far removed from everyday life, but on closer inspection the opposite is true. From the Scientific Revolution in the 16th and 17th centuries onward, Materialism has steadily grown into the dominant worldview of Western civilization. As such, Materialism has exerted an enormous – and very harmful – influence in our culture. It is not for nothing that the word “materialism” is synonymous with greed and the exclusive focus on material possessions. The most important cultural consequence of scientific Materialism has undoubtedly been modern individualism, an extreme form of the dualistic belief in the reality of the separate ego.
The seemingly separate ego experiences itself as detached from – and at odds with – an indifferent outside world, in which it must struggle to maintain itself. Materialism naturally leads to belief in separation because this philosophy sees Consciousness as a by-product of the brain. In that case, Consciousness is by definition tied to an individual and mortal body, and thus different from individual to individual. In this way, Materialism is in large part responsible for the suffering that the dualistic belief in separation entails: egoism, greed, exploitation, feelings of inferiority, hatred, abuse, violence… These are all thoughts, feelings and behavioral patterns that originate in the conviction that I – as this person, with this body and this mind – am nothing more than this individual being, separate from the other people around me, separate from nature, separate from the Universe.[/quote]
Scientific method is appropriate to the solution of objective and engineering problems. But the whole issue with scientific materialism is the attempt to use those methods to define purely philosophical problems. Of course it is true that phenomenology, starting with Husserl, recognises that, but simply referring to phenomenology is not sufficient. The problem needs to be articulated and understood in order to be addressed.
To me that debate is pointless, because there can be no decidable resolution. From one perspective (the phenomenological) consciousness is fundamental. From another perspective,(the scientific) the physical is fundamental. Phenomenology brackets the question of the external world (the physical) and science brackets the question of the internal world (the phenomenological). We can learn from both inquiries, but why should we choose one over the other, especially since that would be to commit a category error.
It might be objected that the question is neither scientific nor phenomenological, but metaphysical. But there are no decidable results in metaphysics; only imaginable possibilities and questions. And this is why religion cannot ever be more than a matter of faith; which is just fine; there's nothing at all wrong with faith.
I think the rise of materialism is due to the rise of technology and mass-production, which in turn is due to the (lucky?) discovery of fossil fuels, and the consequent exponential rise of prosperity (not for all of course!) and decline of religion. There is an element of seeing religion as being "mere superstition" which from a purely (as opposed to practically) rational point of view it is. Don't forget that by some estimates 84 % of the world's population identify themselves as being religious.
The materialism you are upset about is obsession with material wealth and goods (think about the implications of that usage of the term 'good') I would argue. not a fixation on materialist metaphysics, which arguably very few people even think about. So, I see the debate between idealism and materialism as philosophically pointless and sociologically irrelevant, and I think Sass is wrong in subscribing the rise of (economic and erotic) materialism to a philosophical debate that very few are interested in. Capitalism, the idea of personal profit pervading every sphere of human life, is more the culprit, it seems to me.
There's a lot of things you say are pointless, but I most often believe there's a point you're not seeing.
Quoting Janus
Ask the proverbial person-in-the-street. They may not have an articulated or well-thought-out answer but a great many will basically believe the materialist worldview, simply because the alternatives no longer appear credible.
Quoting Janus
They're all inter-connected - science, capitalism, materialism, individualism. It's the times we live in.
There are many here among us who think that life is but a joke. But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate. So let us stop talking falsely now, the hour is getting late.
I agree with the thrust of this. But don't most phenomenologists incorporate the scientific these days under the rubric of a provisional and fallibilistic intersubjective agreement?
I say it's pointless because it's undecidable. What is the point you think I'm not seeing.
Quoting Wayfarer
Which man of the street, though? If you accept the statistic that something like 84% of people are religious, then those people will not accept the materialist viewpoint ( even if they are beguiled by the kind of materialism I was referring to; a fact which supports my view more than the contention that their obsession with material things is on account of a philosophical debate)..
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree with that, but I think capitalism is by far the most pernicious negative influence at work in the world today. The sociological importance of an abstruse debate between idealism and materialism pales into insignificance in my view.
Quoting Tom Storm
I'm not clear as to precisely what you are asking here. There have been movements towards incorporating phenomenology and neuroscience; Varela, Thompson et all spring to mind. Or Dennett's idea of neurophenomenology. I'm sure there are others.
But the problem from the purely scientific POV is that any such investigation will be relying in good part on subjective reports about what is going on in the mind, which is exactly the kind of criticism leveled at phenomenology by its scientifically-minded critics.
The distinction reflects an historical development. There are indications that cross-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary approaches will become more common. Neurophilosophy is a good example. Philosophical biology is another.
Quoting Wayfarer
Did I say it did?
I will also add that Husserl's cultural milieu (as with Heidegger's) encompasses the Germanic academic discipline of 'geisteswissenschaften' - tranlsated as science of spirit - which is something almost entirely alien to Anglo-american and analytic philosophy.
Quoting Fooloso4
Absolutely! And it is precisely because they have started to incorporate the phenomenological and 'embodied cognition' approaches, which in turn grew out of the movement away from old-school scientific materialism.
But those such as Daniel Dennett and other philosophical materialists still advocate precisely the kind of 'objectification of everything' which I'm attempting to critique here.
Quoting Fooloso4
That was addressed to Janus.
No, it wasn't: go back and check.
//oh, and nobody picked up my All Along the Watchtower allusion//
Do you think that feelings never play a causal role in human behaviour?
:100:
My favourite ever single.
I have been reading quite a bit of Lloyd Gerson upon the strength of your recommendation. I have a growing number of problems with his thesis but leaving that aside, how does phenomenology fit into Gerson's schema where 'Platonism' or 'Naturalism' are the only possible approaches and the attempts to find 'rapprochement' between the two are a fool's errand?
No more than, for example, traffic lights "cause" drivers to step on the breaks or the gas. Simply put, they are only signals which inform habits, and when circumstances warrant they can be overriden (ignored), unlike "causes" which cannot.
I'm not sure I'd go that far, but close; top ten at least.
I wonder about that. Do physical "explanations" really explain anything more than how things appear to work? In that sense they could be counted as merely descriptive as much as phenomenological "explanations" can be.
:up:
I remember reading somewhere that Dylan feels like it's Jimi's song too.
Here's the quote:
It is perhaps the ultimate accolade to Hendrix that the creator plays the cover version of his creation.
Dylan has said as much: “It overwhelmed me, really. He had such talent, he could find things inside a song and vigorously develop them. He found things that other people wouldn’t think of finding in there. He probably improved upon it by the spaces he was using.
“I took licence with the song from his version, actually, and continue to do it to this day.”
In the liner notes to Biograph, Dylan said: “I liked Jimi Hendrix’s record of this and ever since he died I’ve been doing it that way. Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it’s a tribute to him in some kind of way.”
All my pleasure. :starstruck:
I've been a big fan of Jimi and Dylan since I was about 13.
I liked the Beatles, the Stones and the Monkees when I was thirteen.
I got into Dylan via Jimi's performance of "Like a Rolling Stone" at Monterey. Blew my fragile little mind.
No, a documentary. Much too young for the Long Hot Summer of Love. :wink:
The early moderns were determined to escape the clutches of the Schoolmen, which indeed had become a stultifying dogma. Nominalism prevailed in the debate over (scholastic) realism and set the terms for modern philosophy. See this review.
In all fairness, Dylan’s original version of All Along the Watchtower was pretty ordinary (on John Wesley Harding?) But the songs of that period - 1968-69 - have indelibly shaped my worldview.
Thoughts don't exist IN THE PHYSICAL WORLD, but the brain does.
That is a necessary improvement. Because thoughts do exist, albeit not in the physical world.
Proof:
I think of my child how he is lonely and pining for a beer while he is away doing his studies.
So I wire him some money to buy a bottle of beer.
My thought made me do something.
Something that does not exist can't have a role in a causative process. Only existing things can cause change in the chains of causation.
My thought, which was created by my brain, if you wish, is independent from my brain. My brain is physical, my thought is not physical.
Yet my thought did cause an action.
Therefore my thought exists. (Without being physical.)
Thank you. Can this be analysed as follows:
In the case of traffic lights, the traffic lights going red are a necessary condition for stepping on the brakes. It's not a sufficient condition because it can be overridden, and for other reasons as well. You can drive through the lights anyway. Is that right?
So, to do your work for you, applying this to the hunger example, feeling hungry is, sometimes, a necessary condition for eating. That is to say, were it not for you being hungry, you wouldn't eat. But it can be overridden. This falls short of a cause in your thinking, yes?
On the other hand, the causes of your eating cannot be overridden. Is that right? Are they necessary and sufficient for eating?
What are the causes of eating? Is it, say, low blood glucose levels, which gets picked up by some bodily mechanism (excuse my ignorance), then the brain consequently initiates motor movement. I know that's skipping all the detail but you get the idea. Is that what you have in mind as the cause? This is both necessary and sufficient for eating to occur?
What if there is food readily available, but there is another factor, an intruder with a knife just enters the kitchen, and threatens you. You run from the room, presumably through some similar causal story about biological processes, without eating. Has the cause of eating been overridden by another cause?
I just want to see how you analyse all this. I invite you to talk about this particular situation, rather than in general, as I find that easier to understand.
I think I understand Gerson's thesis and its relation to the development of the scientific method.
Since you spoke approvingly of phenomenology, I was asking where you thought it fit in Gerson's schema where 'Platonism' or 'Naturalism' are the only possible approaches and the attempts to find 'rapprochement' between the two are a fool's errand"
Phenomenology is not materialist nor mechanistic. It does look for a nature or environment where events happen. Does it require the possibility of "perfect cognition" that Gerson has on the Platonist checklist? And so on.
I suppose you could say that phenomenology is a 'third way' that escapes the opposition that Gerson sees between Platonism and naturalism. It is of note that there are many touch-points between phenomenology and Buddhism, because the latter likewise eschews the 'substance and attribute' metaphysics of classical Western thought.
(Here's a good article on Buddhism and phenomenology. I'd skip the first half, scroll down to the image of the eye. The subsequent passages discuss many of the points that have come up in this thread. )
Here, once again, we can see how it is useful to separate Plato from Platonism.
From the Timaeus:
His imprecision is seen here as well:
Why not be more precise? Isn’t it imperative to be precise in matters of metaphysics and cosmogony?
We are human beings, capable of telling likely stories, but incapable of discerning the truth of such things. In line with the dialogues theme of what is best, Timaeus proposes it is best to accept likely stories and not search for what is beyond the limits of our understanding.
Socrates approves and urges him to perform the song (nomos). Nomos means not only song but law and custom or convention. In the absence of truth there is nomos. But not just any song, it is one that is regarded as best to accept because it is told with an eye to what is best. One that harmonizes being and becoming.
In several places Socrates calls the Forms hypothetical. In the Phaedo he combines a hypothetical account based on Forms together with an account based on physical causes.
In short, Plato cannot be situated on either side of Gerson's schema.
In this discussion of 'materialism', I have been looking for a way to acknowledge Nagel's narrative of how the scientific method came about without accepting that it restricts all of its possible outcomes to descriptions of physical stuff isolated from all other physical stuff. Models have to agree with phenomena. The phenomena never signed an agreement listing what could be revealed by the process.
In that context, Gerson's schema is a response to Rorty's rejection of Plato. That conflict has its own terms that are far away from how to understand original texts. As far as I understand it, I disagree with both of them. I make no special claim at understanding either of them.
As for what Gerson thinks himself outside of that debate, there are many points where I disagree. Apart from his 'schema', I have read a number of his arguments devoted to Aristotle's text that I doubt the old guy would agree with.
Maybe there should be a discussion devoted to Gerson. He seems to be a big man on campus here.
Edit to add: I just ran a search on Gerson on the web site. This has been going on for years.
The problem as I see it, is that his argument rests on the shoulders of Descartes and the problem of judgment based on mental representations. It leads to an insoluble skepticism. In other words, we have no way of knowing whether models agree with phenomena. Although he did work on optics and medicine, his description of physical stuff is based on reason rather than empirical evidence.
In Platonism, generally, as also in the later idealist philosophies, 'what truly is', is discernable only by reason (augmented at least until the Middle Ages by illumination.) 'The sage' is one who is able to discern 'what truly is'.
Whereas, due to the overwhelming influence of empiricism, science has come to be defined as empirical-sensory knowledge, instrumentally validated. So the idea of an intelligible reality in the earlier sense is no longer considered. Which is why 'phenomena' becomes practically synonymous with 'what truly is' (as Carl Sagan said, 'cosmos is all there is', and by that, he means the cosmos as discerned scientifically.)
Quoting Paine
I think I learned about Lloyd Gerson from mentions on this forum or its predecessor. I also listened to his lecture Platonism vs Naturalism which I've posted several times here. As I've mentioned, I find him very hard to read, as so much of his writing is addressed to other academics. But I'm generally sympathetic to what I take to be the gist of his writings.
Quoting Fooloso4
Gerson has considered this:
Whereas naturalism, nominalism, mechanism, materialism, relativism and scepticism are overall highly characteristic of much modern philosophy.
I read Gerson's lecture; you gave me the link to the text of it. I have read a good portion of the book that lecture is basically the preface of. The "Ur-Platonism" is interesting as a general narrative but has lots of problems in the close reading of actual texts. I won't go on at length about what you have not read of Gerson.
Phenomena is what is shown and experienced. Science is empiricism. When you say Carl Sagan said, 'cosmos is all there is', and by that, he means the cosmos as discerned scientifically," is Sagan truly reducing phenomena to what can be proven in a model? Is his observation not similar to the humility expressed in the Timaeus? We live in this place. That circumstance and the conditions bounded by its existence is the foundation of anything that happens within that circumstance.
In regard to Nagel to describing the origin of the scientific method, my difficulty with relating it to the meanings of 'materiality' is whether that is an observation of what those descriptions will not satisfy or a limit on the practice itself. Do you think of it as a garbage-in garbage-out scenario?
I think he's of the conviction that natural science is the only sure pathway to knowledge. But then, science, in that understanding, restricts its scope to what can be objectively understood and measured. From that Tricycle article I linked to above:
Further down:
So, in this sense - which is the sense that I think Hegel and Husserl would understand 'science' - there's a qualitative dimension to science which is almost entirely absent in Anglo-american and analytical philosophy. But I'm sure that Sagan does not draw on that perspective when he says that 'cosmos is all there is' - that what he understands by 'science' is just the objective sciences. Which is why I think he can fairly be accused of 'scientism'.
Quoting Paine
It's not nearly that simple. The materialist conception of nature developed out of many centuries of thought and debate. When we discuss it here, we necessarily have to try and describe it in perfunctory terms, especially considering the limitations of Internet fora, where posts generally need to be short and to the point. But the underlying issue is a very deep one.
For instance - Nagel, as we have been discussing, has been critical of scientific materialism from an avowedly agnostic or atheist perspective - he eschews any kind of religious commitment whatever (same can be said of Raymond Tallis, Mary Midgley, and several others). However when Mind and Cosmos came out in 2012, he was promptly accused of being 'a friend to creationists'. Why? Because to question the physicalist consensus is to be suspected of being religious, even if you say you're not. And that's because of the history, whereby 'science' became defined in sharp distinction to 'religion' - you either accept one or the other. And that attitude, I contend, is actually descended from the 'jealous God' of Christianity, which gave rise to the scientific revolution in the first place. ('The jealous God dies hard'.) It's just that in the mainstream conception, the physical cosmos and natural science has displaced God, or occupied the place previously assigned to God. So you're obliged to accept that it completely displaces anything vaguely metaphysical or religious, on pain of being declared outcaste.
A famous phrase from Richard Lewontin's review of Carl Sagan's last book, Demon Haunted World:
[quote= Richard C. Lewontin, Billions and Billions of Demons - JANUARY 9, 1997 ISSUE NY Review of Books] Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.[/quote]
Which desribes down to a T the attitude of the physicalist poster who was here recently. And that cultural dynamic underlies many debates in my view.
I am going to take some time answering. Thank you for assembling your answer.
Yeah, that's how I see it: "traffic lights" are just (semantic) signals, not (physical) causes.
Okay.
Right.
'Maintaining homeostasis' is the physiological (ergo physical) complex of causes of hunger (effect) that then signals – stimulates reflex-like – 'eating'. It's only the signal/stimulus, IME, which can be overriden (superceded or blocked) by other signals/stimuli.
The "chain of events" would be unbroken but otherwise, that is, it'd remain first-order (i.e. meta-free).
Lewontin views the matter ideologically for purposes that do not address the limits of scientific method. If the method rejects the top-down structure of divine intellect as an explanation of causes, it no longer has a bottoms-up either. All of the formal elements used before the method to help explain the causes of phenomena are now phenomena themselves. If that half of the dyad is no longer given, the other half no longer has a job. The comparison of simple and complex beings, that was partially given by the structure of Nature as Aristotle understood it, must now be worked out in the models.
The models keep changing because they are being tested against objective criteria. How far the method may get to discovering the nature of the whole cosmos is not circumscribed by its use. There are models that use information theory and the structure of development to explain phenomena. The need to confirm these objectively is different than claiming only certain models are possible.
As I mentioned earlier, Chalmer's hard problem may be too difficult to solve. At the very least, Chalmer is not declaring victory nor defeat. The problem with the 'scientism' model is that it gives itself a limit that the method itself does not.
So what is a word ‘made of’? Or a sentence? Why, that would be letters and words. And the same idea, the same proposition, can be conveyed in all manner of combinations of words, and in different languages, while still retaining its meaning. So the meaning is independent of the physical form.
It is a model in so far as it allows to have the 'physical' to be taken for granted.
But I will leave it there. I see that my reasoning only interests you up to the point where I don't support this "attitude."
I remember. I acknowledged that but wanted to emphasize that the observation did not pit mind against matter. What stands as objective criteria is what is in tension with experience as it is experienced.
You're describing the brain, not the thought.
The thought has no location and can only be experienced. Regardless, qua thought, it exists. I prove its existence via the experience of the thought.
Like the experience of pain proves the existence of pain, the experience of the thought proves the existence of the thought.
Then we turn to the assumption or inference that creatures similar in structure to ourselves also have the experience of thoughts.
You would like to separate the experienced Thought, the Idea, from its material genesis, but however aerie and unreal Thought seems to you, it never ever ever happens without a Brain. Therefore, no Thoughts that are actually Immaterial ever exist. Cognition, which arises from the operations of the brain, is evanescent and fleeting, but, just like the unsaved work existing in the Random Access Memory on a computer goes away when it is powered down, it is still the product of that temporary material configuration of the instance it is experienced.
So, Thought, qua Thought, is a material phenomenon in your Brain, and completely inseparable from your experience of it.
Similarly, you cannot show me a Process, cannot even Conceive of one that does not employ the creative powers of some mysterious being who operates outside of the causal Universe, to create a Consciousness than through the billion-years process of Evolution; and as Evolution only takes place in the Material World, then every existent Consciousness -even your own- is proof of the Material World.
So whatever you Subjective impressions of Thoughts and Emotions, they are all still made up of Cells Doing Their Things. And as Sagan -and Hawkins, and Ellis, and on and on - have said, there ain't nothing here but the Cosmos.
And does this 'mysterious being' have a name?
The point is, that the only alternative anyone ever suggests is the logical black hole of a Creator of some kind, and that's useless, for of course, tor then comes the question of how the Creator's creator came to be; and who created the Creator's Creator, and so on Infinitely back, which is Absurd. Logically, the first Consciousness must be the creation of Natural Process.
And, having now a complete a priori hypothesis as to how Consciousnesses are created, why don't we go out and find some Empirical Proof? Oh, wait, we already have a Fossil Record...
I believe this issue here could be your differences on the nature of predicate, type, or substance dualism between the mental and the physical.
Denying predicate dualism seems to lead to having to accept reductionalist physicalism, but I don't think many people consider the repurcussions of this stance. Arguably, all the special sciences, biology, meteorology, medicine, neuroscience, seismology, etc. only exist because of human priorities. Describing brains differently from other types of matter, using terms like earthquake or tornado, instead of talking about the physics of motion, all result from the psychological import of such phenomena. Vortexes appear in the Earth's atmosphere at all sorts of scales and are unexceptional. Hurricanes as a concept exist because we care about exceptionally large vortexes that effect humans, but it's just turbulence and molecular motion.
The second issue is the scientific status of phenomenology. Phenomenology is certainly empircle as I understand it, although I'm not super familiar with the field outside Husserl, who I'm also not super familiar with. It makes factual claims. However, it is unclear how the study can be falsifiable. If someone claims they experience life one way, who can gainsay them?
If you take Popper's critique of pseudosciences (e.g., psychoanalysis, Marxism) it seems they could apply here. Both examples make predictive claims and use data to vet their claims, but have problems being falsified. However, "pseudoscience" does not entail "false," "illogical," "bad," or even lacking in scientific.or explanatory merit. Insurance companies still pay for Jungian treatments despite falsifiability issues for the field because statistical analysis shows it being beneficial for resolving mental health issues. The term just means it doesn't have the same epistemological status as science.
I believe the truthmaker for phenomenology would be that people agree that its descriptions of internal mental life are accurate. This allows for a hypothesis based on empircle data, predictions based on said hypothesis, and verification using data on people's comments about if the theory holds true or not.
I do think you're on to something with it not being the same as accepted sciences though. Unfortunately, the line between science and non-science is always blurry, and even science will rely on ad hoc explanations to save physical laws (e.g., we didn't jettison Newtonian physics when it failed at predicting planetary orbits.)
I think the problem for phenomenology as a science is that any one person can reject its claims about internal experiences and then how do you decide if they are lying, an anomaly, or correct? It seems like the claims will always be unfalsifiable or conversely, unprovable.
That said, I think it can and has had a lot of scientific value in helping cognitive scientists develop hypotheses and explain their findings, but the two are distinct in terms of epistemological status, with phenomenology unable to claim the high bar of a science.
Argumentum ad populum fallacy. "People agree" may be a consensus, Count, but that's not corroborable or ostensible evidence (i.e. truthmaking).
Argumentum ad populum is only a fallacy in some cases. If the question is something like, "who is the most popular football player in New England," and your supporting data is a representative survey showing Tom Brady in first place by a landslide, then popular opinion is valid evidence for the claim: "Tom Brady is the most popular football player in New England." It's valid because opinion is what you are intending to measure.
If opinions could never tell you anything, then survey data would have no validity, and you might as well throw out huge swaths of the psychology and political science literature.
You can use people's responses to statements as data for vetting hypotheses about people's opinions/feelings vis-á-vis X (various biases influencing error rates not withstanding). Since phenomenology is the study of how conciousness appears to people, survey data seems like your best bet for any sort of rigorous analysis (and indeed psychology tackles the subject this way).
Of course, the way people perceive conciousness and the way it seems to actually work appear to often contradict one another. Psychology can sort this problem out with clever experiments and by collecting data on behavior to juxtapose actions with people's descriptions of their perceptions and experience. In some cases, it's possible to collect solid physical data on the topic at hand (e.g., the finding the voluntary movement begins before the sensation of "deciding" to move occurs used this sort of method).
Point being, you can certainly collect data from people on how conciousness appears to them. The problem is that such data alone seems like pretty weak evidence when compared with the multipronged data collection methods of psychology when it attempts to answer some of the same questions. There is also the confounding issue of cultural influence on descriptions of subjective experience.
Such a statement can certainly be corroborated (just ask people). Being corroborated isn't a good criteria for truth (e.g., eye witness testimony corroborates the assertions of prosecutors, but is often shown to be inaccurate when the witness didn't previously know the suspect). Ostensible reasons for something = apparent reasons for something, not (or at least not necissarily) the true reasons for something, so I doubt that's the criteria you want to use.
"Subjective consensus," is what lies at the heart of any measurement in the sciences. People agree a thermometer reads 18 degrees Celsius, and that the movement of mercury up the tube accurately reflects heat, etc. When there are controversies in the science, it's often because there isn't subjective consensus on the validity of a measure.
Is your contention that you can't make factual statements about popular opinion?
That's all I was commenting on. I mostly agree with your position, except that, to the extent that phenomenology would be the study of consciousness as it appears to conciousness (how introspection appears to the thinker), people's statements are valid data.
Edit: I should note that vague predictions, inability to explain exceptions, and lack of explainable mechanisms for why a theory holds have all applied to Newtonian physics and genetics. Meanwhile, pseudosciences such as phrenology have had empircle data, testable hypotheses, mathematical complexity to their theories, journals, peer reviewed articles, and the trappings of science.
Unfortunately, the clear dividing line is somewhat elusive as respects what science is. However, I'd say falsifiability is a necissary condition, hence why I'm not sure phenomenology is going to meet the bar without essentially becoming psychology.
It's tough because you have a mix of cases of science just being wrong (N ray radiation) versus pseudosciences (astrology), but parsing them can become a mess.
I suppose a further objection type/substance dualists would have is that claims that studies of the subjective are not scientific, are not studies of nature, are question begging because they assume the subjective world isn't an essential part of nature. I find these objections particularly convincing given all that can be said about how conciousness misrepresents nature, but it is a tricky argument to defuse without getting bogged down.
This^ contradicts this:
Quoting 180 Proof
In the first quote, the signals do play a significant role in the story of how the brake gets pushed; or in the eating example, hunger plays a significant role in the story of how we come to eat. Whereas in the second quote, it plays no role at all. Distinctions on the meaning of 'cause' or appeals to meta levels don't help you it seems to me. I think you think the phenomenal affects the physical.
EDIT: I'm actually quite interested in what Apo has to say about this. He'll give us some stuff about downward causation no doubt. Anyway, let's attempt a summons.
*casts Protection from Evil*
Throws giblets on the brazier
@apokrisis, you are needed
Hola Apo. What say you?
That's because, there is no signal in the second instance as you say
Quoting bert1
so, on the contrary, my position is consistent.
Are we managing to talk to each other? I think it's going rather well so far, for us.
:up:
Example: If the car would not have stopped if the traffic light was not red, the light played a causal role in stopping the car.
These sorts of counter factual, x-marked conditionals, play havock on formal logic systems. There isn't a clear way to decide the truth status for something that doesn't exist (see: "the current King of France is bald.")
This is why logical positivists relied on statements along the lines of "a substance is conductive, just in case an electrical current is applied to it, and the current flows through the object." Classical if/then statements in natural language don't have to worry about these sorts of counterfactuals since plenty of us feel fine using them, but if you're obsessively trying to ground scientific theories, as the positivists were, this is maddening.
Two things worth considering though:
A. The positivists were able to make enough "just in case" statements to feel they had grounded theories that would allow for traffic lights having a "causal" relationship with stopping cars (they might shy away from the word "cause" though.)
B. Later innovations in using statistical methods to vet x-marked conditionals for "other possible worlds," made the whole problem less of a concern (depending on who you ask).
The problem I see with drawing a distinction between semantic or signaling factors in potential causality versus more obvious physical causes is:
A. Assuming signaling somehow can't have causal import seems to suggest it isn't physical. This might by a pathway for unintended dualism in your system. Elimination has to suggest an alternative physical mechanism that plays these roles, which is hard to do, and it's unclear that even hardline reductivism requires getting rid of signaling or information as concepts in the first place
B. Signaling clearly occurs at obviously physical scales (neurotransmitters, cytokines, logic gates in computers) and it becomes impossible for multiple sciences to function without it as a concept.
C. If you can't form causal connections using abstract signals (e.g., prices) then economics, international relations, social psychology, etc. all become meaningless. But then you have the problem of how they predict physical outcomes as well as they do.
Speaks to the uselessness of what passes for philosophy in our culture.
Caveat: correlation =/= causation ... maps =/= territory...
(Just a reminder, gents.)
:up: (Esp. for using capital letters! :smile:)
Well, that would be a hardline take no one in the philosophy of science actually goes all in on, from what I'm aware of.
Even under the strictures of the old "received view" of scientific theories, you can include these abstractions as part of a theoretical or observational lexicon. You can use operationalization to get around concerns over too much abstraction, and thus dangerous metaphysics leaking into your theories.
The consequence of the received view is just that it can't be said that things such as quarks or leptons exist. All that matters is that they are efficient predictors. Oddly, the most die hard advocates for strict logical grounding and empiricism managed to work their way into a highly pragmatist view of theories, which quite funny when you think about it.
There is a reason this sort of thinking died an ignominious death though.
Right. The map accurately representing the territory is an auxiliary hypothesis. You build your theories out of auxillary hypotheses that operationalize what you want to measure. Per Popper, these auxillary hypotheses need to be independently falsifiable, else you can always explain away bad predictions.
You need auxiliary hypothesis to get anywhere outside basic truth statements about raw sensory experience (which we now know to often be falsifiable themselves). Otherwise, a thermometer isn't a real measure for heat, a scale isn't a real measure for mass, and now something as elementary as Boyle's Law is meaningless.
Can't we just say that the changing light causes a mental state that then causes the person to brake?
Not as a true proposition in the form of "if p then q," since people can run red lights. You also have the problem of the truth value of statements about things that did not occur, such as "if the driver had noticed the light then they would have stopped," since there is nothing they can correspond to.
You can certainly build up to a logical statement that explains how traffic lights can stop moving vehicles, but it requires a lot of auxiliary hypotheses and premises.
However, you run into the problems highlighted by Quine in his Two Dogmas of Empiricism. For one, that you end up needing an endless and circular chain of auxiliary hypotheses to build up your theory, or that seemingly analytic facts/relations of ideas, may in fact just be dogmas.
Sciences also use a lot of analogy, and they use a lot of entities that are isomorphic in nature, such as information, turbulence, etc. Building up definitions for these is difficult using predicate logic. People moved on to using mathematical logic, since it is more flexible, but there are still problems.
As far as science is concerned, I am more on the side of pragmatism on these matters. Although, the endlessly fascinating layers to the natural world, the recursive self similarities of chaos, the protean flow of information as fundemental to the behavior of physical objects, does get my fascination with Hegelian "the truth is the whole" Absolute Knowing going.
I can only hope that I'll one day be apart of a universe fully conscious of its own phase space, having attained the Absolute, pure Gnosis, or some sort of crazy sounding shit like that, .
production and interpretation of signs and codes and their communication in the biological realm:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Right. And biosemiotics is dualist, although not 'substance' dualism:
[quote=Pattee]All signs, symbols, and codes, all languages including formal mathematics are embodied as material physical structures and therefore must obey all the inexorable laws of physics. At the same time, the symbol vehicles like the bases in DNA, voltages representing bits in a computer, the text on this page, and the neuron firings in the brain do not appear to be limited by, or clearly related to, the very laws they must obey. Even the mathematical symbols that express these inexorable physical laws seem to be entirely free of these same laws.[/quote]
I gave hunger as an example of an explanation for behaviour. 180 said that hunger was no more a cause of eating than a traffic light is a cause of hitting the brakes, it being a signal.
But it seems like a bad analogy to me because a traffic light is absolutely critical in the chain of events leading to hitting the brakes. And if the analogy is good, then that means that hunger is absolutely critical in a full explanation of why I eat. And hunger is a feeling. So we have phenomenal experience causing physical actions, in some sense of 'cause' at least.
So I'm struggling. I'll read over the conversation again when I get to a proper computer in case I'm misinterpreting (again).
I'm not sure what maps and territory have to do with anything. If someone could explain I'd be grateful.
The thing that jumped out to me is the claim that causes can't be ignored, while hunger and red lights can. Made me think of positivism and the need for "if p then q" not to be conditional, to hold its status in logical notation such that "if p then always q." Predicate logic can tolerate conditionals ("just in case p and r and s, then q") to be sure, but it can't tolerate modality that well.
That might not be where he is coming from, but it seems related as an issue when you talk about showing cause.
But I'm not sure what he's saying either.
I do see how such claims could work though. If you take a (somewhat) nominalist view of material entities' attributes, then names for complex phenomena will invariably be imperfect constructs, maps instead of the territory itself. The idea of signaling is protean in the sciences and comes in myriad disparate physical forms that are simply not the same thing.
You have the flip side of Kant's transcendental: cognitive models of cause are always filtered through faculties and abstraction, and so don't reflect the reality of actual entities. You're not getting to the real causes when you use imprecise stand-ins for entities and their behavior such as "signaling."
The problem I see here is that this issue is equally true of all scientific/factual statements. Every claim requires auxillary hypotheses for its premises to hold and they all use such stand-ins. That and physics doesn't work without the ability to arbitrarily define systems. It also requires an observation point that represents a physical system itself to avoid violating its own rules (magical observers that can move faster than light, access information without having to store it physically, etc. have caused all sorts of problems for the field but are incredibly difficult to avoid).
We probably shouldn't worry too much about our observational biases. If external objects are real, we must be getting information from them somehow, and we have to be storing that information physically. Recursive representations of the enviornment are the only way a system is knowable.
Thanks, that's interesting. A bit too abstract for me though. Not sure I understand you.
If conceptions of the world were always present in the world, then unicorns would be real. That's why Kant was not very good at this philosophy thing.
A=A. Valid and Sound
A=B . Not Valid, Not Sound
Kant postulaed that there were propositions that were known to be true without needing to verify them. Propositions we knew the truth of before hand, like: Some objects are heavy.
This proposition doesn't require you to verify, you know it is both valid and sound without thinking about it. He called this "a prior synthetic knowledge." If that sounds like complete horseshit, you'd be correct, it is complete horseshit. Each of the words in the proposition have already established meaning within your linguistic paradigm, in association with things you have actually verified first hand. You have experinced the difference between certain objects regards to weight, and have verified such long before you saw the proposition. Meaning it's a completely made up concept, like quite a good deal of what he said.
Gotta be pretty careful about “what Kant is getting at”.
Quoting John McMannis
We conceive of the world.....what way? Conceive of the world in a material way?
Care to elaborate on what you’re asking about conceiving the world and what Kant was getting at?
I believe most materialists would have some knowledge if not a complete one of the opposing worldviews. For a materialist to have absolutely no knowledge of the opposing worldviews would be, interesting, much so in the age of the internet. So perhaps there is meaning in discussing it with them. It's not that they actually can't see, they certainly can see, unless they are truly blinded. Instead they chose actively to ignore the "otherworldly" and thus they do not see. And anything is meaningful if you can make it meaningful. Though on this particular case, what purpose do you want to achieve by speaking about materialism to materialists?
(Thank you for your response to the topic.)
Quoting IP060903
That could be true. Only that, in my experience, they are absolute and unmovable from their position. Indeed, they act as being "blind", although actually they are not, as you say. I mentioned also that they can even get "hostile" --something which unfortunately I have met quite a few times in conversing with them. This is usually a trait of persons who are wrong and they know that, as you mentioned too. They are just defending themselves. And this, because they either don't have "a case" or sound arguments or any arguments at all to defend their position. Moreover, they usually ignore some of my basic questions-arguments, most probably because they don't have a (plausible) answer.
So, I believe that a discussion under the above conditions has no meaning. It's just a waste of time.
Quoting IP060903
None! :grin: I personally, don't speak about materialism to materialists. As I explained above, they are usually not willing to accept or consider or even listen to anything that suggests or even proves that not everything is matter or based on matter. It's a dead issue. Materialism itself is dead. And this was the subject and purpose of this topic.
Isn't that just a nasty piece of unnecessary ad hominem with no evidence supporting it? What evidence do you have that they choose not to see?
Pardon me if you consider that as an ad hominem and an unnecessary one at that. However, I cannot apologize for another reason that is I don't consider it as an ad hominem. My words can certainly be interpreted as an ad hominem, but I myself interpret something as ad hominem if they directly attack the person, that is to make an actual moral evaluation of their character in an attempt to derail the argument. If you have your own argument on why my statements are ad hominem, please tell me and I will consider my words once more.
In my defense, my words are not ad hominem because I am simply describing the phenomenon of the matter, or at least an interpretation of the phenomenon. I am also not attacking anyone at all, I am merely describing things in my view. So I find it interesting that you would accuse me of ad hominem.
The evidence that I have that they choose not to see is frankly simple and non-existent at the same time. It is non-existent as they will say that they do not see not because they choose not to see, but because there really is nothing else to see according to their opinion. Yet in simple view, many other people do see something else than just matter stuff, are you willing to categorize these people as being deluded, in a morally neutral way, and say that they are just making stuff up?
Interesting, though I would ask in what way is materialism dead?
You could have made the point you just made in two sentences instead of three paragraphs. :wink:
Quoting IP060903
This paragraph is incoherent to me, sorry. Do you want to try again or shall we move on?
Near as I can make out, it sounds to me like you are being disrespectful to other's experiences and attributing base motives to people and the position they hold based on nothing but some kind of confused smear. Are you saying they are lying? I can't see how this is any more rigorous or useful than an atheist accusing a believer of following childish fantasies because they can't handle real life.
I must apologize for my incoherency or my seeming disrespect. I hold no disrespect, only disagreements. However, if my words indicate any disrespect, I apologize. I do not say they are lying, because I believe they are sincere in their words. Also, I think it's better we move on, I do not see the value in trying this over.
It's a dead issue. It's a dead end. It's a lost cause. It is dead wrong. It makes no sense. It is based on a lie.
Materialism is dead among philosophers.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
:sweat:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_realism#Speculative_materialism
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliminative_materialism
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_(philosophy)#Methodological_naturalism
Also, my own speculative aside .
I know. There's much more ... Modern attempts to keep materialism alive in another form or create a compromise with non-materialist(ic) views ...
"While naturalism has often been equated with materialism, it is much broader in scope. Materialism is indeed naturalistic, but the converse is not necessarily true. Strictly speaking, naturalism has no ontological preference; i.e., no bias toward any particular set of categories of reality: dualism and monism, atheism and theism, idealism and materialism are all per se compatible with it."
(https://www.britannica.com/topic/naturalism-philosophy)
You must probably know that "naturalism" is mainly or usually contrasted to "supernaturalism" and "materialism" to "idealism". Well, who is talking about "supernatural" things other than parapsychologists and ignorant people? Likewise about "idealism", which refers mainly either to our old friend Plato or to aesthetics. Philosophers do not talk about these things today. Not in my knowledge, at least.
The problem with children like you is that you pretend to know things.God, no wonder Rand devotees have such a bad name. Yuck.
Quoting Mww
Yeah you're right.
Quoting Mww
Yeah I mean that materialism, or I guess material, is just a concept is it not? It's just a word. It's a way of interpreting the world. So if matter is representation, or a way of representing the world, then isn't it just another belief? Just another interpretation? If matter is all that exists, then what about the person or thing that says/thinks it's all that exists? Is this belief in matter also material?
I guess I mean, isn't it another interpretation??
Not an argument, just a tantrum. Did I offend your feelings for daddy Kant?
If it helps your feelsies, I regard Kant as a great scientist of his time, and to suggest otherwise would be absolute fucking nonsense. But, his philosophical views are almost exclusively trash. Now, do be a sweetheart and calm down. If you have an argument, leave one here and I'll address it.
Matter as representation is perhaps more an understanding than a belief. Materialism, a way of representing the world based on the concept of matter, on the other hand, is a doctrine, and would be a relative judgement of truth, or, a belief, but in the doctrine alone, not the concept, which is given.
Quoting John McMannis
This questions a given concept, by involving a hinge proposition sufficient to ground the possibility of a separate doctrine with its own relative judgements.
So, yes, these are both interpretations, or at least the beginnings of them, the means for them as ends representing the world. But at the same time, the possibility of mutual exclusion, the possibility of self-contradiction....all sorts of mean, ugly, nasty stuff.....comes about.
The onus is on the thinker, then, to pick one, run with it, and try not to confuse himself.