How do physicalists explain 'intentional content'?
Apologies if anything I say is misunderstood.
I understand that physicalism attempts to be successful in explanation the location of intentional states (e.g. thoughts/"I think") via whatever route it takes, behaviourism, functionalism etc. but what I can't understand is how a physicalist overcomes the location or even causation of intentional content (e.g. ... that a box is 2 x 2cm). I am not normally one to use intuitive arguments, but to deny the existence of such content surely wouldn't work as it is incredibly apparent that I can imagine an inexistent object right now - namely a 2 x 2cm box.
I know that is the approach of the eliminative materialist (deny), but what would other physicalists theorists/theories say about intentional content + more importantly is there a better response from the eliminativist? I genuinely cannot figure out how physicalism overcomes this problem since intentional content is one of the things most apparent to us and it is clearly not physical.
(I'd like the focus to be on content from intentional states such as thinking/believing/dreaming; since I think physicalism can adequately resolve aspects of mental life such as pain, because they don't have content. And I also accept that the concept of qualia is easily resolved/'defeated'.)
I am only doing philosophy at a high-school level (A2 for those in UK), so I'd appreciate it if you could explain things as clearly as possible or I probably won't understand haha.
I understand that physicalism attempts to be successful in explanation the location of intentional states (e.g. thoughts/"I think") via whatever route it takes, behaviourism, functionalism etc. but what I can't understand is how a physicalist overcomes the location or even causation of intentional content (e.g. ... that a box is 2 x 2cm). I am not normally one to use intuitive arguments, but to deny the existence of such content surely wouldn't work as it is incredibly apparent that I can imagine an inexistent object right now - namely a 2 x 2cm box.
I know that is the approach of the eliminative materialist (deny), but what would other physicalists theorists/theories say about intentional content + more importantly is there a better response from the eliminativist? I genuinely cannot figure out how physicalism overcomes this problem since intentional content is one of the things most apparent to us and it is clearly not physical.
(I'd like the focus to be on content from intentional states such as thinking/believing/dreaming; since I think physicalism can adequately resolve aspects of mental life such as pain, because they don't have content. And I also accept that the concept of qualia is easily resolved/'defeated'.)
I am only doing philosophy at a high-school level (A2 for those in UK), so I'd appreciate it if you could explain things as clearly as possible or I probably won't understand haha.
Comments (151)
Sure :)
So if we took the example of the box being 2 x 2 cm, it is an inexistant object which I am capable of thinking of/imagining, but since inexistant objects (and intentional content itself) are not in the 'physical realm', how would a physicalist account of the mind actually explain this?
I struggle to see how one could locate a specific intentional content of 'a 2 x 2cm box' via behaviour, a function, or even neuroscience (more importantly how one could possibly deny it). Wouldn't the physicalist have to concede that a physical intentional state (e.g. thinking) gives rise to something non-physical (e.g. the 2x2cm box).
Might you be conflating "intention" with the quale of having intention? There are robots on mars that have been programmed to behave in a certain way, which seems to suggest that they possess intention. They don't however possess qualia!
You're conflating intentionality and intention.
But even then, intention is usually understood to be a particular kind of mental state. The robots on Mars don't "possess intention". They're just mechanically determined to behave a certain way.
Really, how?
In this case I am referring to the term 'intentionality' in this philosophical sense:
"the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs"
And intentional content to be:
"the about-ness of something/the answer to the question 'what are you thinking of/about'?"
As opposed to, what I think you're trying to infer, the intention/aim/plan to do X, Y, Z :)
To get anywhere, you've got to decide whether "intentionality" is a property of a mind, or whether "intentionality" can be exhibited by mindless objects.
I think intentionality can be exhibited by mindless objects: robots, computer programs, animals. This in a way solves the problem of intentionality at a stroke. The big problem remains however - that of the quale of intentionality.
Quoting Rawrren
And you could ask that question of a program or a dog. With enough technical ability, you could interrogate the hardware of each. With dogs, you can even get a rough idea what they are dreaming about simply by watching them.
Do you think the human genome is "about" anything?
Yeah this is where I accept the arguments/merits of physicalism, as it can give reasonable explanations up until the 'quale of intentionality' which is where I struggle to see how it's overcome.
But wouldn't one here re-enforce the notion of privileged access? I agree that e.g. we can figure out what a dog might be dreaming about, but for the most part we have no idea what it's actually thinking of and no amount of inspection from neuroscience could ever reveal the intentional content - only the intentional state? Likewise a computer surely does not have intentional content since it cannot make use of intentional states (think/hope/believe) - it only runs based on input & outputs like functionalists say.
Quoting tom
I'm interested to know where you go with this point :p No I don't since it is not part of intentionality.
I should note that physicalists do not all share the same concept of the mind, and not all of them, I imagine, will even accept intentional states as a valid or useful concept. So you would also have to argue that intentional states are absolutely indispensable in any theory of mind.
Yes, we want physicalism to provide an explanation of qualia, but why don't we demand explanations from the other metaphysical positions?
Quoting Rawrren
According to physics, a computer can do everything a human can - i.e. it can have identical intentional or other mental states. We simply don't know how to program them yet!
Do you think animals possess qualia? How about intentionality?
Yes imagining something would be the best example for this situation I feel.
Do you know of any reasoning as to why some reject intentionality? And if so, how do they then explain what we call 'intentional states & concepts'.
Oh I accept that other metaphysical positions have problems with it also, I'm just really interested in physicalism here and how it overcomes it haha. I'm not trying to be biased!
But I can't help but feel while this computer could seemingly do such a thing, it would not actually be acting in the same way (e.g. a computer could not imagine a blue circle).
As for animals, I'm not certain - I've never really consciously thought about it. I would think some higher-level species would be capable of intentionality, yes.
I'm a physicalist. I'm not an eliminative materialist. In my view, intentional content, and all other mental content, is rather clearly physical. It seems obvious to me that it's something that our brains do. And neuroscience supports this via obvious correlations between mental content and observables, ranging from fMRIs to observations of patients who've had various types of brain injuries.
That doesn't mean that we have something like a blueprint of how exactly intentional content works yet. But of course, stances that posit intentional content as something nonphysical don't have anything like a blueprint of how exactly it works yet, either. So if not having a blueprint were a sufficient reason for you to reject a stance, you certainly couldn't embrace dualism.
Quoting Rawrren
Under physicalism, imagining a 2 x 2 cm box is a brain state. So it is an existent object in that sense.
Quoting Rawrren
As well one should.
So we can imagine what is not. We can be ready to act in every way that is "realistic" to something that could physically exist.
The reason we can do this is because of symbols. A symbol is a physical thing - some mark, a vocal noise, a gesture, a DNA sequence, a brain state. It takes up time, space and energy. But it also has a meaning that exists outside the physical world.
And so symbols give the power to think about what is not. We can think about the world as any kind of other. We can indeed think about the world from the generalised idea of being a self in a purposeful or pragmatic relation with the world.
So intentionality arises because we can act on the wish of the world being physically other than it actually is. Symbols, or a modelling relation, create a space for ideas that exist outside the physics of the world even though the means of being outside that world are always still unmysteriously physical.
Well, if you stipulate from the start that you are merely imagining a thing, you are, ipso facto, stipulating that the thought is not about, does not not refer to any concrete object in the world, as far as you are concerned. That is already given by your formulation, no matter what approach you then take - physicalist or otherwise. So I still don't understand, what difficulty do you see specifically for physicalism in this scenario?
Quoting Rawrren
One way of viewing intentionality is linguistically, by giving interpretations of our intentional language while eschewing intentional idioms. But I confess that I am not prepared to discuss this issue in much detail. However, here are a couple of SEP articles that you may find as a good starting point for exploring different views of intentionality and surrounding issues: Intentionality, Consciousness and Intentionality.
It seems to me as if he's just having a problem grasping mental phenomena in general as possibly being physical. He naturally thinks of mental phenomena as "the opposite of physical." He probably stressed intentionality for this because he wants to talk about physicalism that's not eliminative materialism--he wants to make sure that we're not just exiling mental phenomena period in our descriptions of how mental phenomena can be physical, and because of the old "intentionality is the mark of the mental" aphorism (initially from Brentano), that was popular enough to become a cliche in phil of mind literature.
"[i]Every idea or presentation which we acquire either through sense perception or imagination is an example of a mental phenomenon. By presentation I do not mean that which is presented, but rather the act of presentation. Thus, hearing a sound, seeing a colored object, feeling warmth or cold, as well as similar states of imagination are examples of what I mean by this term. I also mean by it the thinking of a general concept, provided such a thing actually does occur. Furthermore, every judgement, every recollection, every expectation, every inference, every conviction or opinion, every doubt, is a mental phenomenon. Also to be included under this term is every emotion: joy, sorrow, fear, hope, courage, despair, anger, love, hate, desire, act of will, intention, astonishment, admiration, contempt, etc.
Examples of physical phenomena, on the other hand, are a color, a figure, a landscape which I see, a chord which I hear, warmth, cold, odor which I sense; as well as similar images which appear in the imagination.
These examples may suffice to illustrate the differences between the two classes of phenomena.[/i]"
Franz Brentano, "Psychology From an Empirical Standpoint", p. 60, 61.
"[i]What positive criterion shall we now be able to provide? Or is there perhaps no positive defnition which holds true of all mental phenomena generally? Bain thinks that infact there is none.* Nevertheless, psychologists in earlier times have already pointed out that there is a special affnity and analogy which exists among all mental phenomena, and which physical phenomena do not share.
Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do not all do so in the same way. In presentation something is presented, in judgement something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on.
This intentional in-existence is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon exhibits anything like it. We can, therefore, define mental phenomena by saying that they are those phenomena which contain an object intentionally within themselves.[/i]"
-Ibid. p. 68.
So, in short, intentionality isn't a characteristic that helps one to distinguish phenomena from the physical world, rather, it's a property of a specific class of phenomena, to distinguish them from other phenomena. All mental contents. Brentano states so himself at the start of the chapter these quotes come from:
"All the data of our consciousness are divided into two great classes—the class of physical and the class of mental phenomena. We spoke of this distinction earlier when we established the concept of psychology, and we returned to it again in our discussion of psychological method. But what we have said is still not sufficient."
-Ibid. p. 59.
So how do physicalists explain intentionality? Well, they don't. They tend to not make the distinction between mental and physical phenomena. The distinction between mental and physical phenomena is a non-issue to them.
Physicalism assumes that all mental phenomena is strictly mechanical, if intentionality is a mental phenomena then it is also, by default, a physical phenomena.
This means there is some effective mechanical procedure.
What physicalism does not do fully, yet, is give a complete account of all mental phenomena.
However this should not be a hard problem (it simply means reverse engineering the mechanisms of the brain that produce mental phenomena and intentional states, so I guess kind of a hard problem but not the hard problem).
That is to say if you can be sure that you have mental phenomena there must be some effective mechanical procedure for arriving at that conclusion without error.
If there is not such an effective mechanical procedure then you cannot actually arrive at the conclusion without error.
For physicalism there is no issue, all mental phenomena has an effective mechanical procedure.
Of course this remains a assumption at this point and will remain so until a full account of mental phenomena is arrived at.
But if there is not an effective mechanical procedure for all mental phenomena this would be quite a difficult philosophical problem.
It would mean that our own mental phenomena is undecidable and there is no way for formal logic to assail the issue.
Note that if mental phenomena and intentional states are undecidable then there is no method for concluding that those phenomena or states exist.
It would be undecidable as it were, so being sure that they exist, physicalism assumes, is the same as being sure there is an effective mechanical procedure to determine that existence.
For any problem that has a definite yes or no answer there is an effective mechanical procedure for resolving that issue.
If mental phenomena has no effective mechanical procedures then it should not be possible to say...
Determine with certainty that you have intentional states...for example.
If you can determine that you have intentional states then there is an effective mechanical procedure for doing so.
The physicalist answer to the question of intentionality is actually philosophically boring, it assumes that there is some mechanical process at work that can effectively produce mental phenomena.
It would be more interesting, to be sure, if we imagine that something else is the case and then still presume that intentional states can be arrived at without any effective procedure.
If there were some other method for achieving this that would be quite a remarkable breakthrough indeed.
However no such breakthrough has been discovered so, philosophically, physicalist proceed with what we can know based on current methods.
I'm not saying anything about physicalism one way or the other. What I am pointing out however, is that the distinction between physical and mental phenomena is peculiar to Brentano and (some) members of his school.
If there's not an effective mechanical procedure for some mental phenomena, then presumably at least some mental phenomena are obtained via some sort of nonphysical, non-mechanical procedure, no?
I don't see why that would suggest that they're "undecidable" metaphysically, unless you're strictly talking about logic and not metaphysics there. But I don't know why you'd be strictly talking about logic. There can be an effective mechanical procedure for all mental phenomena while logic might not be able to address any mental phenomena in terms of effective mechanical procedures. (Unless you're also strictly meaning something about logic or computation theory by "effective mechanical procedure," but then that would make dubious the claim that physicalism amounts to saying that anything about mentality is an "effective mechanical procedure.")
Why group animals with robots and computer programs? Animals have nervous systems, and they have their own goals independent of us (often enough at odds with us). Computer programs and robots just do what we design or program them to do. As such, attributing intentionality to them could just be a case of anthropomorphism. Seeing intentionality in things that lack it because they have a behavior or look familiar to us. It's like seeing shapes in clouds or thinking the volcano god is angry.
You mean there is no objective method. Subjectively, I know that mental phenomena exist, because I experience it. That's how I can know with certainty that nobody else can be a solipsist, to the extent one takes solipsism seriously.
Quoting m-theory
You mean to be sure other people have mental content? Because again, I experience my thoughts, my perspective, my dreams, etc. Whatever mental content are, I have them, and I cannot doubt that I have these experiences, however one wishes to categorize them.
Quoting m-theory
You mean what can be objectively known. Here is a potential problem for physicalism. It beings with objectivity, which means factoring out our individual subjective experiences. This works great for science. But it has the one big problem of turning around and explaining subjectivity, because at the start, subjectivity was removed.
In Lockean terms, you get rind of color, sounds, smells, etc to explain the world in terms of number, shape, extension, etc. That's great until you need to account for our having colors, smells, etc.
How does one derive smell from number? Is there a mathematical equation for experience? Do you now what sort of algorithm would enable a machine to experience the sweet smell of rose?
Because animals are exquisitely engineered robots! Animals must have certain brain-abilities in order to function as they do, and one of those seems to be intentionality. It seems impossible to explain their behaviour without recourse to intentionality.
Obviously current robots don't have the complexity of behaviours associated with even relatively rudimentary animals, but then, they've not had 3.5 billion years of nature selecting these behaviours! Even so, is it really possible to explain the behaviour of a robot without recourse to "computational" states that refer to other things? I'm not so sure. I think a tiny amount of intentionality is still intentionality.
We know that robots don't possess qualia, and there is no reason (anthropomorphic fallacy aside) to suspect animals do. Thus neither has the quale of intentionality.
No, I mean there is no logical method if it is undecidable.
Quoting Marchesk
To say you are definitively aware of experiencing your thoughts, to physicalist, is no different from saying there is an effective method for being certain about the existence of your thoughts.
That is to say that thoughts are decidable.
If they are not decidable that poses problems for physicalism sure, it would mean that we cannot
logically determine if we experience intentional states.
But it would also be a problem for everyone else as well.
Quoting Marchesk
There would be no logical method to decide, subjectively or objectively, that we have experiences.
If there is a logical method for deciding the existence of experiences and intentional states then there is no issue for physicalism.
Quoting Marchesk
If a color or smell is undecidable then how could you be certain you were experiencing colors or smells?
If you can be certain physicalism assumes this means these things are decidable and that therefor an effective mechanical procedure is the account.
Sure it would be more interesting if we imagine that there is something else going on, but no breakthroughs in methodology exist to warrant such speculation, it is simply a speculation for speculations sake.
There is no issue for a physicalist because if you can be certain about these things, then that means these things are decidable, which means that there is an effective mechanical procedure to account for that decidability.
That leaves two options, these things are not decidable, a problem for the physicalist and everyone else.
Or there is some other method for decidable problems in new formal systems of logic as of yet undiscovered, an unnecessary assumption at this point.
Quoting Marchesk
The answer is simple.
How does one know for certain if there is a smell such that this question is answered definitively yes or no?
The only currently known method for this is with an effective procedure of finite steps.
Or decidability.
If there is no effective method and a smell is an undecidable thing, then this is not simply an issue for physicalism, it is an issue for anybody claiming that they smell.
If smell was undecidable you would not actually know if you smell or not.
For a physicalist saying that you know for certain that you smell is the logical equivalent of saying there is an effective method for deciding that you smell.
You can conjecture that decisions about the existence of intentional states and/or experiences is undecidable from current understandings in logic, sure.
It is probably more interesting than the physicalist position, sure.
But it certainly isn't logically necessary to speculate thus, at least not at this point.
I disagree that this something to be logically determined. My experiences would be the premises one starts with to make a logical argument. It's not something to be argued for. There is no line of reasoning I follow to logically determine that I see red. I just see red and am aware of it. That's where logical argument can begin, but not before then.
I don't need to determine that I have experiences. I have experiences, period. What do those experiences amount to (or what is their origin and nature)? That's something which can possibly be determined by logical argument, but not that I have them.
Now whether you have experiences which I don't have (as an extension of my experiences) is something which can and has been argued ad nauseam. But notice that the solipsist need not and cannot make an argument for their own experiences. They just are. It's brute.
All logical argument has to start somewhere.
The same sort of thing could be said of external objects. An idealist could turn your argument on it's head and claim that material objects are undecidable for the physicalist.
So you don't use logic to know if you have experiences or not?
Quoting Marchesk
So there is no logical method for deciding if you do or do not have mental phenomena?
Quoting Marchesk
Or it is possible that there is some logical method for determining your experiences, but it is simply not within your subjective awareness, and thus seems to be brute when in fact it would be an effective logical method.
I also don't agree with the notion that because mental phenomena just are, no unpacking necessary, that therefor there is an issue for physicalism.
That would actually be an issue for those making the claim that mental phenomena just are.
I don't follow sorry.
No, do you? How does that work? You form an argument and then experiences pop out with the conclusion? I'm curious, do you experience forming this argument?
Quoting m-theory
There's a logical argument for what constitutes mental phenomena, but that I experience seeing red, etc is not an argument.
There is a logical argument for determining the nature and cause of my experiences, which could be physical. A physical correlation has been established, to the extent one accepts physicalism on ontological grounds (which I'm fine with btw).
But there is no logical argument for the raw fact that you have experiences. You just have them, and then at some point, encounter different arguments for why and what they are. And then maybe make your own version of them.
Experience is a priori to any argument.
An idealist could ask whether material existence is determinable by logical argument, or just something the physicalist begins with as a premise.
Then you cannot actually claim you are logically certain you are having them.
If you are sure then you must appeal to some other method, and the burden of proof is not on the physicalist.
Quoting Marchesk
Again that you are seeing red is either decidable or it is not.
If it is decidable, then the physicality appeals to an effective procedure as the account for red.
If it is undecidable then you are not sure you are seeing red.
Or there is the appeal to other method for deciding the existence of red, which again is not the physicist's burden of proof.
My entire point here is that physicalist do have an account for mental phenomena, and that the skeptics can disagree with that account to be sure, but what they would be in error if they said that mental phenomena is inexpiable for the physicalist and the physicalist has no account for them.
Physicalism claims that the account for mental phenomena is an effective procedure because mental phenomena is decidable.
Seems like a topic for another thread maybe.
Do you think we are passive conduits of experience to our self, that the act of presentation is something that we only can experience as an observer. Or do you think that our experiences are representative and that we are in some sense responsible for what we experience as that which we represent to our self.
Wouldn't the same principle apply to my existence? Am I supposed to provide a logical argument for existing? Isn't it just the fact that I exist?
My existence is a starting point or arguing. Maybe I try to argue that I exist because God, or evolution, or aliens. But that I exist is brute in that I can't argue for or against it.
Yes that does not address the issue of your knowledge of mental phenomena that simply are.
How to you know they simply are?
If you can't not know they simply are, for the physicalist, this is equal to saying there exists some effective procedure which decides mental phenomena.
That you are subjectively aware of that effective procedure is how to account for the perception that mental phenomena just are.
That certain neural activity is the cause of consciousness? The problem here is:
1. Distinguishing this from correlation
2. Showing how certain neural patterns implement consciousness (and why others don't), and whether that can be reproduced in other media, and to what extent other things or animals are conscious.
3. Determining the exact nature of consciousness.
So with water we understand the properties to be due to the chemical nature of H20 when those molecules combine together. We don't have that sort of thing for consciousness. We don't even know what it is. An electrical pattern? Information? A network? Algorithms implemented by the brain? Does it extend out into the body? Is it interaction with the environment?
Otherwise, we're just noting that certain regions of the brain light up under fRMI, or if you're brain damaged in a certain way, you lose consciousness, or whatever.
So you need a chemistry or some science of consciousness that answers the various questions. What is bat experience, if it has experiences? Can a machine be conscious? How did it evolve, etc.
Because I have them, just the same way I know that I exist, because I exist. Granted, I have to the kind of animal that is self-aware to do that. You might ask me to logically argue for being self-aware. But that would be silly.
Yes having no full and complete account is very different from having no account.
I agree physicalism does not have a full and complete account of mental phenomena.
But like I said there is no reason to assume that there can be no full or complete account, or rather it is not logically necessary to assume this.
Again how do you know you are having them?
How can you be sure?
Descartes has already demonstrated that there is a logical method for being sure you exist.
That you are not subjectively aware of a method is not equal to therefor it just is.
I guess philosophy is just silly that way!
8-)
How do I know I exist? How can I be sure?
Quoting m-theory
How do I know that I think? What makes thinking any different than experience with existential questions?
I experience therefore I am. That's just as good.
These sort of questions are silly. You don't need to argue that you exist. Descartes only got to that point because he was trapped in doubting everything else and needed an out.
If I am certain that you exist, it is because there is an effective procedure such that it is not logically possible to doubt that you exist.
Quoting Marchesk
If there is no room for logical doubt this will entail that there is an effective procedure for deciding.
The arguments against physicalism qua qualia is that no physical theory has the structure needed to explain consciousness.
David Chalmers, Colin McGinn and Ned Block have argued along those lines. Chalmers argument is that structure and function do not account for experience. Ned Block's argument is that the view from nowhere, or objectivity, cannot account for a view from somewhere or subjectivity.
The Lockean way of thinking about it is that we abstract from subjective qualities to arrive at the objective ones, and then we try to justify just the ontology of the objective ones by explaining the subjective ones in objective terms. But this is impossible.
It would be like coming up with a mathematical equation for the experience of red. Math isn't something that captures experience. It's an entirely abstract language.
I am not certain that you exist, I'm just confident beyond reasonable doubt. I am certain of my own existence, whatever that entails (brain in vat, Neo, demonic dream character).
That is the point.
When we claim there is no logical grounds for doubt this entails an effective procedure.
Descartes showed that to doubt existence would be a logical contradiction.
Where there is no existence there is no doubt.
If there is doubt then there is existence.
To doubt entails that something must that doubts.
If there is such a certainty there is an effective procedure for deciding.
Alrighty then, to ask whether subjective experience exists entails that something which experiences subjectivity exists.
It's not quite as straightforward, because you need to also show that objectivity is abstracted from subjective experience, such that arguing objectively for subjectivity is to assume subjectivity in the first place.
IOW, doubting subjectivity undermines the objective. This is something that Dennett, etc seem to not realize, but probably they would not accept the premise that subjectivity is necessarily the starting point.
So maybe more argument is needed here. For me, it's enough to note that you don't have my experiences, and I don't have yours, and the only way we know about the objective world is via our own experiences.
Yes being logically certain entails and effective procedure.
If there is no logical room for doubt there is method such that you can decide without error.
Subjectivity is abstracted from a necessary objectively existent dichotomy.
There is the self, and the not self.
Were it not so that these are necessarily distinct things it is not logically possible to arrive at either subjective or objective.
As sure as you are that there is self, you are necessarily just as sure that there is a not self.
I'm not, because solipsism retains it's logical irrefutability under the right formulation, even if I don't find it compelling.
You're saying because of the other who has their own experiences, I know that mine are subjective, so it's the objective existence of other experiences which justifies my own subjective experience.
I don't think idealists would agree with that, but not a bad attempt.
If you are not then you have no well formed logical method to define self.
You would not be able to distinguish self from not self.
My world is my self? Yeah, I identify my own self as this body amongst other bodies and objects, but it's not the only way to think about the self. I could identify self with the summation of my experiences.
Isn't mysticism and Eastern religions about overcoming the illusion of self and seeing that all is one, and all that jazz?
No I am saying it is not possible to abstract anything from elusive subjective access.
This would lead to an infinite regress from ill definition.
If it were necessarily the case that this were true it would lead to self recursion.
If self recursion is not the case then we can be logically certain that it is not the case that there is only exclusively subjective access.
That is very valid and something I hadn't thought of when trying to think of how physicalists would overcome it. Thank you for the rest of your answer as well :)
And thanks to everyone who has replied, sorry I didn't reply to a lot of you after the first few posts, but you've all managed to help explain how physicalists would respond to intentional content which is what I needed to know.
Someone on reddit also linked me to a short paper which aims to dispell the, what the author calls, 'psychological, ontological and logical' myths of intentionality as well. I mean I'm sure most of you will probably not learn a lot from it as you all seem pretty intelligent people already, but here it is if you want to read: http://faculty.fordham.edu/klima/FILES/3M.pdf
Really I don't want to spend my time refuting solipsism.
You can conjectured that is the case if you want.
But of course you cannot logically found that solipsism is a necessary truth.
Physicalism isn't a thesis about or that depends on formal logic in any procedural way.
Interestingly enough, the idealists, at least some of them, might agree with this. Didn't Berkley argue against abstacta?
But I don't agree, so I might agree that some of our experience is objective. So let's say that Locke was basically right and shape, number, extension, etc are objective features of physical objects.
So that's great, we can do science and believe that it truly attempts to describe the world as it is. But what about when we want to explain the rest of our experiences?
Do we draw a line in the sand and deny that color, sounds, smells, etc are really being experienced?
If we can do that, then why stop there? What makes the objective world that we experience any more real? Why not deny that we experience shape, number, etc?
It potentially undermines itself, or at the very least, is inconsistent. What is being done is deciding that certain experiences are real, and the rest are not even experienced.
Except that physicalism explains reality with formal logic.
What about when we dream of seeing red? Well, we don't actually dream, we just seem to remember to have dreamed. Those are the contortions one has to make to consistently deny subjective experience.
But the advantage is that it makes the hard problem go away for Dennett, and he gets to be on the side of science, while Chalmers, etc are mysterians and woo mongerers. And by Dennett, I mean anyone who argues along these lines.
We have to draw a line somewhere.
If these things are decidable then there is a method for describing them mechanically.
So decidability is a great line to draw in the context of physicalism.
The trick is learning how nature accomplishes this in physical systems.
It is not an easy problem but there is no reason to assume it is the hard problem such that there is no avail.
Quoting Marchesk
The objective world is just about accessible information.
For the physicalist subjective and objective are not mutually exclusive terms and physicalism does not approach explanations of phenomena under the assumption that these terms are mutually exclusive.
Quoting Marchesk
I must admit I do not follow you here.
I don't understand why how this is the case?
By that, you mean it appeals to physics, which is empirically driven?
No it doesn't--not necessarily at least. But is there even one example of a physicalist whose physicalism amounts to "explaining reality with formal logic"? Who? Give a reference for that.
Again I pointed out that there are good deductive reasons for rejecting solipsism.
Well this is just silly because...yes it does.
Yeah, bullshit. Again, give one example of a physicalist whose physicalism amounts to this.
I assumed you were making a Dennettian style argument, which is why you were asking how I knew for certain that I had experiences. Dennett has stated that we don't have any sort of subjective experience. We are the equivalent of p-zombies.
But you might be arguing that subjectivity is reducible to objective, physical processes, which is different from eliminativism about qualia. Chalmers has argued that you can't make such reductions, because experience is not reducible to structure or function, which is similar to saying that the experience of red is not captured by number or shape.
Nonsense.
That's some example you buffoon.
Yes but if Chalmers is certain he has mental phenomena, then this can be reduced to an effective procedure for ac count on my view.
If red is undecidable then Chalmers should not know if he is or is not experiencing it.
Where he is sure that he does, logically entails an effective method.
You're arguing that our self-awareness is necessarily decidable, otherwise, we wouldn't be able to know. So knowledge is decidable.
Be nice.
I don't give an example because it is not necessary to do so.
Physics is described with math (formal logics).
This is readily available fact for all.
Where it is not logically possible to doubt then there is an effective procedure to account.
I'll be how you deserve.
Physicalism is just physics?
That is demonstrably false.
The physical world is described with maths.
Hence formal logic has a great deal to do with physicalism.
Saying it does not is silly and I have no obligation to engage such an obvious falsehood.
No I didn't. You need to be able to read better than that if you want to not come across like a buffoon.
I said, "Physicalism isn't a thesis about or that depends on formal logic in any procedural way. "
I will be honest, I have no interest in why you believe that what you said is valid.
It is irrelevant to any point I have made on this thread.
Physics isn't formal in that physics is derived from (or driven by) experimental results. The wave equation exists because of the double slit and other such experiments. So does GR and every other scientific equation.
This was what lead to the acceptance of GR in particular, the formal logic predicted things that were eventually empirically verified.
It more like a two way street.
We make formal logic models, and then verify them from observation and vice versa.
You're saying utter nonsense about physicalism being a thesis re whether there's a formal logical "effective decision procedure" about the ontological status of mentality.
You are silly if you think there is no formal logic that justifies the position of physicalism ontology.
I have laid out the deductive reason why physicalism asserts the claims that it does.
What is the formal logic that justifies the "position of physicalism ontology"? (Is English your first language?)
I don't find it odd that when I asked you what the formal logic was that justifies the "position of physicalism ontology," you didn't respond with the formal logic in question. Rather, I completely expected that.
Here.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/#PriPosPhy
Now answer my question.
How is that you believe there is no formal method for justification of physicalism yet you claim to be a physicalist?
LOL--there are three disconnected formal sentences there (though not expressed strictly formally at that):
S entails S*
If S then S*
If S & S# then S*
There's not even any formal logical argument of any sort there.
Quoting m-theory
If you're asking how that's possible, it's because physicalism isn't a thesis about or that depends on formal logic in any procedural way,
Aside from that, I don't take formal logic to be a justification for much outside of strictly formal logical concerns (and then it's still relative to the particular species of logic at hand). Formal logic is purely an invented language for thinking and talking abstractly about relations, where much of it is a game of extrapolation, an erector set resting on the basics of the invented language.
Man I don't have time to link you to all the author's that have made formal arguments for physicalism.
I thought your quibble was whether or not there is any deductive(a priori) method for justifying physicalism.
You should probably browse the entire article or skip to the references and begin browsing there for examples of the tradition of physicalism and formal logic.
-fixed-
Quoting m-theory
Aka the wild-goose-chase-that-will-hopefully-lead-to-you-just-forgetting-about-the-ridiculous-claims-I-made gambit.
I am sorry but it does not make sense to say that physicalism has nothing to do with formal logic.
A great many physicalist philosophers have attempted to justify physicalism with formal logic.
That is just a fact my friend.
Sorry.
While I think sensory apperception is a thing, I don't think cognitive apperception is: When one of our senses receive an impulse, there is a moment where information exists only as activity in ones nerve system. I don't think this information is perceived though (we are talking milliseconds, here), because the action potential didn't reach the relevant processing centers in the brain yet.
When sensory information reaches the brain, it passes through a region of the midbrain called the optic tectum. This region is responsible for object location. Then it moves further along the brain, to reach a region called the visual cortex, which is responsible for object identification. Object identification relies on our previous experiences, and as such, it's necessarily based in ones own subjectivity.
Right, but observation can also disconfirm. If GR had been contradicted, then the math wouldn't have mattered. So unless there is some deep reason for math and observation to always be in agreement, provided the physicists do the right math, then it's not formal.
I am not sure I follow here...
I get from this that you are saying that having a model does not entail there will be an empirical verification of that model.
So I suppose that you are suggesting that because I am deducing that if there is certainty beyond logical doubt and that this will entail an effective procedure that this will not necessarily become empirically verified or may even become falsified?
Is that right?
.
And indeed, no one said this.
Quoting m-theory
So you say, but you can't give a single example.
I guess you win then.
'Robot' doesn't come up on that page. (Well, according to the robot that searched it.)
I've seen definitions of physicalism which state that, roughly, everything which exists is either physical or supervenes on the physical. So, intentional (i.e. content-laden) mental states needn't provide a serious problem to physicalism, provided said states are understood to supervene on the physical.
I don't see how this follows. Solipism is the belief or thesis that one's own mind is the only existing mind in the world. That you are certain that you have mental states (and thus a mind) in no way rules out that someone else may be a solipsist (it would only certify that they are incorrect in their solipsist belief).
Yeah, but what exactly does it mean to supervene? According to Chalmers, physicalism require logical supervenience, which rules out strong emergentism and nonreductive forms of physicalism.
I am not particularly acquainted with the various flavors of supervenience (indeed, I already consider it to be a logical relation, so I'm not sure what distinction "logical supervenience" holds). Could you give an outline of Chalmers's position? Presumably, in order for his view to provide a problem for physicalism, he holds that mental states are "strongly emergent" from physical states, else the point is moot (I'm also not sure what "non-reductive" means here. Much philosophical confusion seems to have arisen over issues of whether A is "reducible" to B.).
Physicalism is true iff everything is logically necessitated by physicis, such that a God-like being from the Big Bang could predict what sorts of things would emerge. As such, there can be no physically identical world which differs in any way from our world.
Strong emergentism would rule out God being able to predict consciousness, societies, evolution, etc in advance. Contrast this with the game of life, where the initial state plus the rules absolutely determine all patterns that emerge as the game unfolds.
Reductive physicalism would at least require that there are bridge laws reducing (or translating) domain A to domain B to C all the way down to fundamental physics. So even though we couldn't go from the mind to QM or GR, we could find laws bridging from neuroscience to biology, and from biology to chemistry, where it's obvious that chemistry has a very fundamental relationship to physics.
Nonreductive physicalism wouldn't permit such bridge laws. There would be no way for us to reduce sociology to evolutionary biology, or what not. We couldn't bridge from high level domains all the way down to physics.
That's my understanding. And it leads right into Chalmer's discussion of p-zombies.
The first problem with this is that physicalism doesn't require a belief in (strong) determinism. One can be a physicalist and believe that some events are acausal or ontologically probabilistic.
Sure, but they need to be entailed by physics, even if there's a probability attached to it. QM doesn't posit entirely new things coming into existence, only that known existing properties have a probability wave when you measure for them.
What does "entailed by physics" mean exactly? You're not saying something about the science of physics per se, are you? And otherwise, what does it mean to say that it needs to be entailed by the physical world?
This is a philosophy forum, so no I'm not talking about the science of physics, I'm referring to what the metaphysical doctrine physicalism requires.
How about referring to it, then, rather than referring to referring to it? In other words, how about saying what it means exactly?
It means exactly the same thing as saying that everything is made of XYZ. It's a statement of what ontologically exists, and by contrast, what does not. It's a statement about the fundamental building blocks of reality.
"Everything is math" would mean that math is the foundation of reality from which everything else is somehow formed. There can't be any exceptions to that for it to be true.
Well, that makes no sense. You know that I'm asking you what entailed by physics amounts to, right?
So an answer would have to fit "x is entailed by physics just in case _______" and the blank would be whatever the explanation is of what the phrase means.
No, it means that if you knew everything about physics, you would know everything that could be made up of physics, whether it's realized in our universe, or not (maybe because some early quantum fluctuation didn't lead to the right conditions).
That's saying something about the science of physics per se, isn't it?
It's saying something about the nature of the physical world, since physicists aren't God.
So "If you knew everything about the physical world" then? I'm just clarifying because "physics" can be read (and probably should be) as being about the science.
The science could turn out to be wrong about a ton of things after all, couldn't it? And that could be the case no matter how we progress with our social practices that count as that science.
Jesus man, this isn't that difficult of a concept. Is everything made up of the stuff of physics, or not?
I'd imagine it's encoded in some network of neurons.
I don't think it's that simple. What counts as "the stuff of physics"? If you just mean whatever is currently posited by scientific models then how do you account for newly discovered things? If you'd said this before we'd even conceived of the Higgs boson or dark matter would it have then meant that these weren't physical?
Or maybe the "stuff of physics" is just whatever has a causal effect on the world? But then that would entail that something like interactionism is false by definition. Does that seem right?
See Hempel's dilemma.
Again, it seems like you're wanting to simply rehash the old physicalism vs dualism (or whatever) argument. I'm not interested in that. We've done that a bunch already.
What is the goal, then? The OP is asking how intentional content can be incorporated into a physicalist framework. That is traditionally part of the mind/body problem.
Do you have a different approach?
What I was hoping to discuss with you in this tangent was "What does 'entailed by physics" mean exactly?" We never got very far with that.
That the physics of the world necessitates the existence of everything. Which means that particles, fields of force, spacetime, constants, and laws of nature determine absolutely what can and what cannot exist.
Which means that something like math owes its existence entirely to physics. There is no platonic realm. So does consciousness. There can be no physical identical world lacking it. And so on.
But you don't have to be a realist on physical law to be a physicalist either.
Sure, I was just making a list. Causality is it's own deal. Arguably, laws of nature, if they're real, transcend physics.
But that is a totally different discussion, attacking physicalism from a very different angle.
?? I don't really understand your comment. You can be a physicalist who believes that some phenomena can be acausal or ontologically random, and you can be a physicalist who doesn't buy realism for physical laws.
Physicalism need not have anything to do with the science of physics.
And one need not be a realist on logic, either.
So how is it the case that physicalism is necessarily about "what's logically necessitated by physics"?
Yes it does. Physicalism is predicated on the stuff of physics being what's ontologically fundamental.
So what? You need logic to make meaningful statements.
Quoting Terrapin Station
If it's not, then there's more to heaven and earth than is dreamt of by physicalists.
So you can't be a physicalist and an instrumentalist?
The science of physics is not the same thing as what the science of physics studies. You seem to be continually conflating the two (because you seem to be using the term interchangeably for both things).
No, no way. An instrumentalist is not making any ontological commitments.
Okay, sure. But you can't argue for physicalism by positing something not part of the science of physics, and use that to defend physicalism.
So panpsychism is not physicalism, because they are positing an extra ontological property onto the world.
Yes you can. In no way is physicalism necessarily subservient to the science of physics. It's not some sort of supplication to another discipline. The only thing that's required is that you think that everything is physical. You can believe that the science of physics has just about everything completely wrong and still think that everything is physical.
That is literally saying nothing whatsoever, since you're free to state whatever you want and call it physical. What would it even mean for physics to be completely wrong and yet physicalism to be true?
That's got to be about the stupidest comment I've ever heard. "Just in case your physicalism isn't a deferral to the science of physics, then we have no way to tell what in the world you might be referring to by 'physical.'"
Well, what do you mean by "physical"? The world? What we sense? Reality?
Because that's not saying much. Any metaphysical doctrine can do the same.
Instead of saying what I mean by it--because my view is relatively idiosyncratic, at least with respect to how I state it, let me ask this: aren't you familiar with materialism in general? And if you are, you know that materialists go back hundreds and hundreds of years, right?--long before there even was anything like a science of physics per se. So how do you make sense of there being materialists prior to the formal development of science? Are you at a complete loss what they're talking about ontologically with respect to their materialism?
Because of the Greek atomists positing that atoms and the void were all that ontologically existed. Everything else was made up of that. I suppose that Thales and Aristotle posited alternative materialistic views with water or the five elements.
But those have been outdated by the findings of science. You can't seriously maintain an old-fashioned version of materialism. We know they were inadequate. There's more than atoms and the void, or water, or the five elements.
You're getting confused here regarding the exact content of their views with the sort of thing they were talking about. What do all materialists pre-science have in common that makes them materialists?
Mind independent, natural stuff? It's kind of hard to specify a material ontology without being specific. Thus atoms and voids, or five elements.
That doesn't really work either. If the physical is mind-independent stuff then the mind isn't physical by definition.
A clue should be in the term "materialism"--materialists/physicalists generally think that everything is material or matter as well as perhaps "forces" of matter and so on.
Really? You fall back on matter after rejecting physics? BTW, there is a reason it's called physicalism. And that reason is because physics has shown that the world is made up of more than matter, and that matter itself isn't even truly fundamental. It's a form of energy.
That would matter if physicalism were adherence to whatever the received view is in the scientific discipline of physics, but it isn't.
There are a couple reasons that "materialism" started to fall out of favor as a term, and one of them was assocations with Marxism.
The idea that energy can obtain apart from matter is part of the "crap" I was referring to earlier. It's incoherent.
I think you have your own version of physicalism as evidenced by:
Quoting Terrapin Station
As such, whenever I mention physicalism going forward, just ignore it, because it obviously has nothing to do with your form of materialism.
It's not just "my form." It's ridiculous to think that every (other) physicalist is merely deferring to the science of physics, and that that's all there is to the position.
Of course it's not just deferring, since it's a philosophical position. But the term is physicalism for a reason, and that's because modern physics has shown that matter isn't the only game in town. Or to put it a better way, matter is only part of the physical picture.
The term changed from physicalism because "materialism" fell out of fashion, again with Marxist connotations being a major part of the reason for that. "Physics" etymologically simply refers to "the natural things" so it was a good choice for a substitute term.
Theres no requirement to accept that there's anything like "independent" energy to be a physicalist.
That's the first I've heard of this. As far as I'm aware, the term "physicalism" was adopted over "materialism" because modern physics includes things that can't be considered as matter as the term "matter" was originally understood.
[quote=Werner Heisenberg]The ontology of materialism rested upon the illusion that the kind of existence, the direct 'actuality' of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range. This extrapolation, however, is impossible... atoms are not things.[/quote]
[quote=Paul Davis and John Gribbin]Then came our Quantum theory, which totally transformed our image of matter. The old assumption that the microscopic world of atoms was simply a scaled-down version of the everyday world had to be abandoned. Newton's deterministic machine was replaced by a shadowy and paradoxical conjunction of waves and particles, governed by the laws of chance, rather than the rigid rules of causality. An extension of the quantum theory goes beyond even this; it paints a picture in which solid matter dissolves away, to be replaced by weird excitations and vibrations of invisible field energy. Quantum physics undermines materialism because it reveals that matter has far less "substance" than we might believe.[/quote]
Do you have any reference to Marxism being a major part of the name-change?
I'd have to search for something. It's not just something I read. I learned about this from philosophers I was interacting with, as a student and beyond.
By the way, you're quoting scientists/science writers where there's no indication that they're talking about the fashion to use the term "physicalism" rather than "materialism" in a philosophical context.