The irreducibility of phenomenal experiences does not refute physicalism.
So the central argument against physicalism is the irreducibility of consciousness experiences to physical facts about our brains.
However, it seems reasonable to suggest that conscious experiences are perceptual representations of information from the outside world; we would probably be all direct realists if it weren't for illusions and other quirks which betray the fragility of perception. We can further motivate this representational view through the knowledge we have from neuroscience about how perceptual qualities are directly related to different physical stimuli at our sensory boundaries e.g. colors and wavelengths etc.
Question is: If these experiences are representations of things in the outside world, why would I expect such a representation to be reducible to the brain activity that supports it? The information in a photograph doesn't contain any direct information about the physical medium it is being represented on, and neither should it if it is caused by information from the outside world.
Perceptual representations of trees can be reduced to the constructs of biology, chemistry and physics that occurs within a tree because those things are what trees in the outside world are made of. Why should a representation of a tree be reducible to brain components which have nothing to do with the tree and are physically separated from it? If that were the case, wouldn't that mean the tree were reducible to multiple mutually exclusive physical arrangements of matter - that seems implausibly incoherent to me? I use the example of a tree but that should be the case for any representational experience that is caused by information at sensory boundaries. Wouldn't it be bad evolutionary design if our perceptual representations were giving us information about what was going on inside our own head as opposed to the things in the world they are supposed to represent? Wouldn't doing so require an implausible neuronal architecture also, transmitting information about its own goings on, which would then interfere with the useful information coming into the brain from the outside world?
I think we can then question the effectiveness of the main argument against physicalism because it assumes that our experiences should be reducible to information about the brain. But if experiences are information about the outside world, I don't see why this reducibility should actually be the case from our subjective perspectives at all, regardless of the metaphysical nature of the universe. If our experiences are always going to be irreducible regardless then how can this irreducibility be used as an argument against physicalism?
However, it seems reasonable to suggest that conscious experiences are perceptual representations of information from the outside world; we would probably be all direct realists if it weren't for illusions and other quirks which betray the fragility of perception. We can further motivate this representational view through the knowledge we have from neuroscience about how perceptual qualities are directly related to different physical stimuli at our sensory boundaries e.g. colors and wavelengths etc.
Question is: If these experiences are representations of things in the outside world, why would I expect such a representation to be reducible to the brain activity that supports it? The information in a photograph doesn't contain any direct information about the physical medium it is being represented on, and neither should it if it is caused by information from the outside world.
Perceptual representations of trees can be reduced to the constructs of biology, chemistry and physics that occurs within a tree because those things are what trees in the outside world are made of. Why should a representation of a tree be reducible to brain components which have nothing to do with the tree and are physically separated from it? If that were the case, wouldn't that mean the tree were reducible to multiple mutually exclusive physical arrangements of matter - that seems implausibly incoherent to me? I use the example of a tree but that should be the case for any representational experience that is caused by information at sensory boundaries. Wouldn't it be bad evolutionary design if our perceptual representations were giving us information about what was going on inside our own head as opposed to the things in the world they are supposed to represent? Wouldn't doing so require an implausible neuronal architecture also, transmitting information about its own goings on, which would then interfere with the useful information coming into the brain from the outside world?
I think we can then question the effectiveness of the main argument against physicalism because it assumes that our experiences should be reducible to information about the brain. But if experiences are information about the outside world, I don't see why this reducibility should actually be the case from our subjective perspectives at all, regardless of the metaphysical nature of the universe. If our experiences are always going to be irreducible regardless then how can this irreducibility be used as an argument against physicalism?
Comments (154)
But your whole OP actually questions reductionism. You ask:
Quoting Apustimelogist
Isn't that just what reductionism is arguing for? It's physicalism which argues that experience is nothing but neural goings-on. So the very fact that experience is irreducible to physicalism, is not a counter-argument, but a re-affirmation of the argument.
Oh, and welcome to the Forum.
Yet our vision has also a limit here as we do not have the sensory ability to see the roots of the tree at first instance. So trees are not concepts of ideas but actual real things. At least I think thats what youre getting at.
You also refer to meta cognitive processes such as where in the mind/brain this tree is being perceived which is undisclosed to us perhaps due to evolutionary efficiency of the way our brains are structured.
To answer your question I think brain processes and vision are interlinked and in constant interplay during visual stimuli presented to the senses. If you close your eyes whilst looking at the tree, the tree disappears. Perhaps a brain scan during such vision can interlace with the tree being viewed in the brain itself in real time or not.
The real issue for me is not with sensory inputs when it comes to physicalism but abstract ideas generated by minds such as math or our ability to compute in the form of mental arithmetic on the fly such as 7+7 etc.
These I believe are irreducible to physicalism but other sensory stuff may be such as the taste of sweetness.
This analogy can be extended to all manner of experiences. So every experience is, in some sense, a wave of neural activity, and also sensory stimulation, memory, anticipation, and many other factors. Each of those factors is, from one perspective, physical, comprising sensory and neural reactions. But what the experience is, can only be understood first-person, as an experience, not as the third-person observation of neuro- and physiological data.
Thank you for the welcome. The point I try to make is that if experiences are representations of things in the outside world then maybe they can never be reduced to brains. Yes, you can say - "well I have experiences and that is that" - but a physicalist could just say that his experiences are his brain. You would tell him he is wrong because experiences don't reduce to brains but if this irreducibility is something a physicalist expects or is consistent with physicalism then the argument wouldn't work.
But a physicalist doesn't say that. A physicalist says that experience can be described wholly and solely in physical terms. To that extent, yours is a straw man argument - you're misrepresenting the argument that you're wanting to criticize.
Does the fact that a physicalist have no answer to say literary creativity or art highlight where it falls short as a credible philosophical concept ? For me it does because creativity is higher form of process than mere experience (a la Kant metaphysic).
Although I have questions too regarding this, if ideas exist a priori than wouldnt this point to genetic markers passed down through millennia ?
An example of this exists in some birds whose chicks are immediately scared upon seeing a certain shape in the sky meant to represent an eagle.
Not sure if this applies to humans but the above example is a real one in the natural world.
Very interesting questions. I think the naturalist response is that there is no need to introduce anything like the philosophical a priori to account for instinctive animal behaviours - that these can be explained in purely natural terms as behaviours that have evolved over millions of years of natural selection. But there are some very interesting lines of inquiry in that area if you study it deeply. After all, most of modern biological nomenclature and classificatory science began with Aristotle, refined and elaborated considerably, but the vestige of Plato's forms is still visible to the discerning eye, I would think. This is where philosophy of biology is a very fascinating field of study.
Quoting Apustimelogist
We need to get clear on what 'physicalist' and 'physical' mean. Basically 'physicalism' or 'physicalist reductionism' asserts that the only ultimately-existing things are physical in nature, and that higher-level functions such as mind and organic life emerge from or supervene on the physical.
One of the basic assumptions of physicalism is that what is real, apart from being physical, is also completely describable in objective terms. The representative physicalist is Daniel Dennett - indeed, it was his kind of argument that David Chalmers had in his sights. And Dennett says
So, if there are 'good reasons that they cannot be' explained like that, as you say, then you're actually questioning physicalism, not the argument against physicalism.
Quoting Apustimelogist
And that is actually nearer to the outlier philosophy called 'mysterianism'.
But the whole point of physicalism *is* to explain something in physical terms. Otherwise it's not 'an explanation'. So if you're saying, it's physical in principle, but can't actually be explained by physicalism, then you're not offering a defense of physicalism, beyond saying that you hope or believe it is true. It's like what Popper calls 'promisory materialism'.
This is precisely the point of phenomenal consciousness not necessarily telling us anything about a physical world but rather representing it.
The argument does not refute physicalism outright it just presents a problem of irreducibility within materialist views. Phenomenology makes no assumptions about some proposed existing world and works purely with experience as the core of our worldly knowledge. It is hard to refute that we all act as if the world is a physical certainty though.
The way I see it is that we necessarily operate as if things exist and said things exist due to our ability to question them NOT because we have apodictic/irrefutable knowledge of them.
Consider the way that you read. Do you read words as sounds? What's that all about, seeing things as sounds? Did the brain get so confused that it can't tell the difference between a sight and a sound? You could say that the sound in your own head is a representation of the thing outside your head, the written word, but what kind of representation is that, to represent a seen pattern as a heard pattern? Well, the representation, which is the sound in the head, simply represents what is seen by the eyes, which is an image in the head, so one representation just represents another representation.
If a representation represents another representation, how do you get to the point of concluding that there is something outside the head which is being represented? Suppose the brain just likes to produce things in a willy-nilly way, like the way pure mathematicians produce axioms, with complete disregard for anything supposedly real, in a supposedly real external word. Then, if those created things prove to be useful to the being possessing them, that might be an evolutionary advantage. However, we still cannot conclude that there is anything being represented, by those created ideas, images, or whatever you want to call them, we just have useful tools. Nor can we conclude that there is an real, external, physical world.
And yet, according to the Philpapers survey it seems the majority of philosophers somehow manage to conclude, what you say can't be concluded.
Nope. Just pointing out that physicalist explanations claim to do what you say they're not capable of doing. But then you go on to claim that this inability is itself an argument for physicalism, but that is incoherent.
As a muddle.
As a physicalist I can say that you are correct.
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Apustimelogist
Perhaps your non-reductive physicalism is compatible with that of Davidson?
I'm currently reading a book by Mathematician Charles Pinter, subtitled "How the Mind Creates the Features & Structure of All Things". And it's the creative aspect of the brain processing which produces mental experiences that are completely different from the physical source. I won't go into the details here, but basically the brain converts incoming isolated bits of information (e.g. photons) into integrated packets of meaning (e.g feelings, experiences, sensations) that are relevant only to the observer, and not inherent in the source.
Pinter uses the 20th century psychology Gestalt Theory of Peception to make his case. A Gestalt is simply a holistic collection of parts with a meaning that is not in the parts --- hence the experience or sensation cannot be reduced to the physical properties of the incoming photons or electrons that originated in an external object. In other words, the Representation (Map ; concept) is not the same as the Object (Terrain ; thing). The mental map excludes a lot of the physical properties, and artistically adds some interconnections & re-arrangements that are relevant only to the Perciever. The Whole is more than the sum of its parts.
The takeaway from this understanding of Perception as Interpretation, implies that the translated*1 subjective meaning (Qualia) cannot be reduced to the properties of the object (Quanta). Experiences are meaningful (significant) to the Subject, but meanings are metaphysical/immaterial, not physical/material. There's definitely a correlation between physics & metaphysics, but the creative causation (translation) by the brain produces novelty (a system, instead of merely reproducing the original. The brain is a machine for making meanings, but meaning is not the ding an sich. :smile:
*1. Translation often adds personal significance & feelings of the translator to the literal words of the author. The human brain is born with compartmentalized categories, which are later filled with personal experiences & feelings & prejudices. The image below is an example of the brain adding its own expectations to the incoming data. There is no triangle in the image.
THE TRIANGLE IS NOT OUT THERE, but added by the brain as a new meaning that is inferred, not seen
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That thing is cool. I actually see a difference in the white between inside and outside the triangle, as if there's a line marking the edge of the triangle. But then I can make the line go away if I want to.
What you're saying is that you have faith in science, given its results, and science generally presumes a physicalist stance. So that even while you recognise something like the 'explanatory gap' or 'the hard problem of consciousness', you think physicalism is a pretty safe bet regardless. I don't know if that really amounts to much of an argument for physicalism. And it says nothing about alternatives explanatory frameworks. If there were a satisfactory non-physicalist account, such as those of analytical idealism, then that ought to be considered.
Quoting Gnomon
:clap:
Also, notice the heading in Pinter's book, Symbols in Nature, towards the end:
[quote=Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 150). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition. ]Symbolic systems are among the oldest inventions of nature. Evolution could never have gotten off the ground without the molecular genetic system, which is a paradigm example of a symbolic scheme. The double helix is a symbolic structure, essentially an extended proposition, which contains the description of an organisms entire body plan.[/quote]
He doesn't really develop the idea, but it converges well with biosemiotics.
Im not aware of a metaphysics assuming that. If it doesnt, it can still be abandoned, just not for those reasons.
I don't think that characterization describes the view I promoted so well. I think the explanatory gap is significant enough to question physicalism but I think that if that explanatory gap can be explained away as being due to limitations or quirks of information processing then there is no reason to think that explanatory gap is a consequence of some intrinsic ontological distinction.
I think rather than an argument explicitly for physicalism, it is a counter to arguments used against physicalism specifically that use irreducibility to say that the mental and physical are different. But since the idea of what the physical actually is is a bit up in the air or ill-defined I don't think the argument can be used as a way of ruling out idealist, panpsychist or neutral monistic who might just say something like physical things are actually just mental things. But I think the main significance is the argument is a defence for the physicalist against irreducibility.
OK, but if the materialist/physicalist model of reality keeps failing to explain consciousness (either by explaining how it happens, reducing it to brain states, or arguing successfully it doesn't exist at all), how long before we ditch the metaphysical assumption that non-conscious mindless stuff exists?
I get what you're saying. The problem is that this implies that not everything can be explained in physical terms. So, this cuts against many common formulations of physicalism, such that "a complete physics can, in principle, explain everything."
Now maybe, as you suggest, we should not be surprised that such versions of physicalism fail. Perhaps we can suppose some sort of ontological monism, such that minds emerge from physical nature, but we need a certain type of predicate dualism to describe all of reality. But then what exactly is it that makes nature "physical?"
If physical facts can only describe one set of things in the world, then it seems like "physical" is a subordinate category, and that a higher category should subsume both the physical and the mental aspects of reality. Moreover, if physical facts can't describe everything, then it doesn't seem like we have causal closure, and if we don't have causal closure, I don't see the point of physicalism.
The question then becomes: what does physicalism explain that other ontologies cannot and how does it differentiate itself from objective idealism aside from a bald posit that nature is essentially "physical?" Objective idealism can be as naturalistic as physicalism, so that cannot be the relevant dividing line. The dividing line would seem to be the claim that there is something that is ontologically distinct, a substance or process that is "physical," and that this physical substance/process somehow supervenes on all that is mental in a way that is relevant enough to be worth positing. That is, physicalism has to have some sort of extra explanatory value to it after we allow that it cannot explain/describe all aspects mental phenomena.
But going the other way seems easier since all our knowledge of what we call "physical" is necessarily part of first-person experience.
I for one, am not even sure what physicalism is supposed to mean in terms of ontology anymore (although I think it's an extremely strong thesis re philosophy of mind, i.e. "that the body is essential to mental phenomena."). The natural sciences increasingly tend to describe things in terms of process, not substances. What is supervenience in the context of a process metaphysics? I don't know if it even makes sense. But without supervenience and causal closure, the idea that everything has a sufficient reason that can be described in the language of physics, I am not sure there is an ontology left to call "physicalism." At that point, "physicalism," just seems to be a stand in for "monism," "realism vis-a-vis the existence of an external world," and "naturalism," but none of these effectively differentiate it from idealism and the latter two don't even differentiate it from dualism alone.
So maybe the lesson is just to abandon "physicalism" and embrace "naturalism, monism, and realism?"
A: In my view, rejecting the duality of mind and body makes explaining how conscious happens an invalid question.
B: I personally don't believe that consciousness can ever be reduced to brain states but I don't think this is a fault of a physicalist model but can plausibly be explained away as a consequence of limitations or quirks in information processing.
It depends what is meant here. Imo the natural sciences point to dualism being false because 1) science has found no evidence of separable mental substances that are separable from physical phenomena. 2) science seems to suggest that physical constructs are sufficient for intelligence, perception, cognition etc.
So I think science suggests something like monism. I think its then reasonable for someone to take a physicalist world view since the constructs we find in the natural sciences are the kinds of things a physicalist universe would be based on in principle. I think maybe a physicalist might say that they aren't denying we experience things just that they are nothing above the physical.
----- ----- -----
Obviously some people have said that the natural sciences more or less only describe the behavior of things not what things actually are intrinsically - they are free to posit that this stuff is phenomenal. But I think in light of points A and B above and the difficulty of creating a coherent, non-trivial definition of what conscious phenomena actually is, I don't think someone who identifies as a physicalist can be accused of failing to explain anything anymore than a physicist can be impelled to explain why anything exist at all and there isn't just nothing.
The physicalist is therefore not necessarily be saying that "non-conscious, mindless stuff" doesn't exists just that it wouldn't be anything above the physical and anything about it that can be meaningfully explained about it can be done through constructs from the sciences.
I might even go as bold to say that this kind of physicalism I am envisioning might be compatible with someone who believes that the universe is phenomenal as long as they believe that there is nothing more to explain about it than through the constructs we find in the natural sciences, which I think would probable render their concept of phenomena a bit explanatorily redundant and inaccessible, perhaps useless.
One of the problems with anti-physicalism is not only that they cannot reduce it to anything, but that they refuse to, and this is a clear indication that the project is doomed. It's just a surprise that it's taking so long.
I am not sure I totally agree. In the OP I suggest that irreducibility is a natural consequence of the fact that experiences are representational. I then don't think that it is coherent for a representation to be reducible to things that cannot be identified with what is being represented, like with the photo example: a photograph of Everest contains information about everest, it does not contain information about the medium the photo is on, how the photo got there, what physical processes enable us to see the information in the photo etc.
It doesn't seem coherent to me that we should be able to gleam that information if the photo was a veridical representation of Everest. That the photo doesn't contain this information is not a fault, its exactly what the photo is supposed to do. The fact that experiences cannot be reduced to the physical then is not some kind of epistemic gap that it should be possible for us to breach; no, if experiences are representational then it is impossible to explain this in the same way that a round square is a logical impossibility. We should not expect physicalism to explain this kind of thing.
At the same time, it might be possible for the physical to demonstrate this kind of thing in principle through things like machine learning where we design an architecture for some artificial intelligence and describe the information it can process, describe the limits of what it cannot process or explain. This is speculative but I think that is a plausible avenue which is a surrogate for an explanation; for instance, if we create an advance A.I., it might start to say that it has experiences that it can't explain consistent with what we say about how our own experiences are irreducible.
Obviously, someone may just say that experiences emerged somewhere along the development of this A.I. but then the interesting part would be if we can explain why the A.I. is saying these things purely through the dynamics and mechanics of its architecture without recourse to explicit experiential constructs, which is exactly how a physicalist might want to explain away the irreducibility. If we cannot help but find our experiences irreducible as a consequence of the nature of what our brains are doing, then we may have just explained away irreducibility without needing to say that this irreducibility is because the mind and brain are distinct entities.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I think from my perspective, it's not so much about some kind of physical substance as the kind of models we have about the world. As you say, the idea of a physical substance is ill-defined and vague; however, the models that have emerged in the natural sciences seem to be successful and I think that is what we should follow when trying to decide the best way to describe things that actually exist.
For me, it is very explicit that physical models are constructs which have been created by us, biological machines. I am not sure scientific models allow us to do more than predict things in some type of fashion which is directly situated and embedded in our own experiences. There isn't necessarily even a strict dividing line between predictive scientific models and other types of models in our experience; in modern neuroscience, the brain is a predictive machine which mediates all our models whether in the sciences, humanities, the way we use language, folk physics, our understanding of social situations or our own mental concepts etc.
There is therefore room for all sorts of constructs in our mind and they are just that - models! For me its trying to pick the best ones for some purpose, not necessarily turning these models into concrete substances. There is not necessarily a strict difference between models we have for things in physics, chemistry, biology, economics etc, and I don't want to say these each have their own fundamental substances either. I am agnostic, even anti-realist perhaps on that kind of thing, nonetheless there seems to be a strong intuitive picture that emerges in the natural sciences about how some constructs e.g. ones in physics seem more fundamental or to have more primacy than others. The value of physicalism then is in the value and power of physics in the natural sciences.
Someone might say this kind of physicalism is difficult to explicitly differentiate from an objective idealism but then again to say you are idealist seems to me to be adding something extra on top of the advocacy of these models in the natural sciences as opposed to just taking the explanatory value of those models at face value.
Obviously all these models are actually embedded and situated in experience as has been said. The physicalist would then say that this experience is identical to the physical just that there is no coherent way of making the reduction from the information represented in conscious experiences and the models of the physical we have constructed in conscious experience, also situated in those representations. The point of the OP is supposed to be that if irreducibility can be explained away as due to the nature of information processing in our brains then the identity between experiences and the things in physics can be defended, we just have an inherent inability to explain it in the same way that a machine learning architecture has inherent limits on what it can do or how self-reference has inherent limits.
Yes, I think you could view it this way though I think the argument in the OP can also be used to defend physicalism. I think it depends on someone's inclinations; yes, physicalism is poorly defined but terms like "monism" or "naturalism" are no better I don't think. Yes, maybe it would be more true to say something like we cannot access the fundamental ontologies of nature but I also think physicalism does capture something more about my inclinations than the other labels, and captures how physics does seem to take a central role in my understanding of what exists. In some ways its actually a more honest characterization of my views and attitudes than something like neutral monism
Why resist the idea of "meaning" as an idea (ideal) instead of an object (real) --- an abstract symbol rather than the concrete thing symbolized? If Meaning was a material object we would be able to see & touch it. AFAIK, there is no Meaning apart from a conscious observer. Likewise, Consciousness is not a thing, but a process of constructing meanings relevant to the observer.
From my perspective, Meaning is the output (product) of mental processing (computation) , not in the sensory input (raw data), or the material cogs & conduits of a mechanical Brain. That's why immaterial meanings must be transformed back into material forms (data, spoken language, typographic words) in order to convey the immaterial meaning from one mind to another. Matter is the vehicle not the content of Meaning.
However, Materialists are still searching for the hiding place of ideas & feelings in the the gray matter and white matter of the brain. What they find though is simply electrical/chemical activity that is correlated with meaningful images & ideas. But, the researchers still must infer the metaphysical meaning that corresponds to the physical activity. They can't see or touch it, but must imagine the meaning associated with physical behavior. They show images of localized brain activity, must must provide labels to convey the meaning.
As the OP implied, Meaning is Noumenal (map), and not reducible to Phenomena (terrain). So, Meaning is not a Thing, but a mental representation of a thing : a symbol, analogy, metaphor. That perspective doesn't "deflate" the status of Meaning, it elevates meaning from mere "isness" to "meaningful" & "significant" to Me. :smile:
Yes, but as Pinter himself says on page 148 : "a symbol is a placeholder". So, we need to avoid confusing the material Symbol (reference ; pointer) with the meaning symbolized (referent). Some BS researchers seem to equate the brain terrain with the mind map. Semiotics is relevant to my own philosophical notion of Enformationism ; but as a science, it tends to equate Mind with Matter, and biological code (cypher) with the chemical carrier. :smile:
Is semiotics bullshit? :
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7tSrFR54hT2FwXto8/is-semiotics-bullshit
THE SIGN IS NOT THE MEANING
I don't know how well what I am about to say will come across but ...
I don't really understand what immaterial meaning ... means. To me, meaning is like a construct we use to refer to our own understanding and knowledge which is directly embedded and enacted in the dynamics of experience...
In other words, meaning is just use. Use is just dynamics of experience which reflect dynamics of neural activity.
Meaning can therefore be deflated in terms of being implicit in these dynamics as opposed to being an explicit thing
I think part of the problem is your analogy. It's not analogous to the claims of physicalism, and it's making claims that physicalists would not accept.
The photograph absolutely does have information about the medium that it is made of. I can subject a photo to all sorts of chemical tests. I can identify what it is made out of, what it dissolves in, etc. I can discover fingerprints and DNA on the photograph, which will help me determine its history. I can identify how it is that the image of Mount Everest appears there. If I am a physicalist, there is a causal, physical history linking the image to the mountain.
Information theory has generally not been thought to be incompatible with physicalism per say. There is nothing mysterious about how a photo plate comes to encode information about the light that was allowed to reach the plate. From the photo I can likely determine what time of day the picture was taken at, the weather as the picture was taken, etc. The film itself will tell me what type of device was used to take the picture and I can then use my computer, a physical device, to find all sorts of information on the exact physics that would allow a person with a camera to create such a picture.
How the photo got to where it is has a physical causal history per physicalism. If it is in an unlikely place, say in a locked drawer, I can surmise that a human being put it there because any other way for the picture to end up in that place is exceedingly unlikely. The location of a photo absolutely does contain information about where the photo came from and how it got to where it is. For example, if the photo was created using antiquated technology, and shows sign of having aged, I will know the photo was taken many years ago. Based on the glaciation seen in the photograph, I might even be able to date it to within a single year or few years.
You seem to be setting up some sort of dichotomy between the "image" on the photograph and the physical photograph. But physicalism is an ontology that explicitly denies that any such dichotomy exists except in our minds. Film is physical. It encodes information about the pictures taken with it by virtue of physical processes. And, in comparison to how minds are generated, the physical processes involved in photography are very well understood in physical terms and arguably already reducible to them.
Right, but science itself often doesn't make any sort of ontological claims at all. When physicists do make ontological claims, they increasingly seem to be embracing various forms of immaterialism, mostly ontic structural realism, rather than physicalism. Certainly, you can do away with physicalism without doing away with science, which is why the development of what physicalist philosophers have considered to be major problems have themselves gone unnoticed in the scientific community. Problems that might be fatal to physicalism, such as "how to coherently define supervenience" simply don't matter to science because physicalism is not a prerequisite for science.
There are two questions you can ask of the photograph:
1. How do you explain the informational content of the picture?
2. How can the material photograph host the content of the picture?
1 is not subject to a physicalist argument around the properties of the photographic material, but 2 is. But for phenomenal experience, the 2 question cannot (as of yet) be answered in terms of the physics of brains. Pointing out that 1 also cannot be answered by brain physics (and that it shouldn't be expected to be), doesn't seem salient to the anti-physicalist argument that 2 cannot be answered.
But I am talking about the information contents of the actual image, you are talking about features of the physical object the image has been projected on. I can produce the same image on different paper or have it on a digital screen and identify the contents of the image; those contents are not directly related to the physical composition of a photograph you can hold in your hand and cannot be reduced to it, which is the main point.
Yes, it's true that that image is not totally independent of other factors; after all, the type of camera and resolution etc will have an effect on the image but these largely still come from the same interactions during the photo-taking process by which the image of Everest was stored - it is still information of the image which is independent of the physical medium an image is projected on and so cannot be reduced to it.
I wasn't very clear at all when I said this because I didn't anticipate it to become a topic of the convo but I actually mean't to say the actual physical process by which the photograph was created in the moment through light reflectance and absorption and what ever complicated physical processes are involved. This can't be inferred just from looking at an image.
Yes and this is what we have done in neuroscience but the point is that that physical information is not directly inferrable from the image itself, it relies on additional empirical observations extraneous to the features of the image, e.g. the arrangement of color parameters that form what we can identify as the image.
Well I don't think there is necessarily a dichotomy in the way you suggest since the information in the photograph is being perceived and interpreted through a physical process - whatever person or perhaps even machine, computer program etc is reading the image.
But the point is that to read the information in the photo, whatever machine has to be designed to distinguish arrangements of color parameters or inputs that map to those arrangements. That information is the contents of the image but nothing in that arrangement will tell you about the medum that image is projected on. I can imagine a circle, see it on a computer screen, see it on paper. What tells me that that image is a circle and differentiates it from non-circles has nothing to do with some kind of medium it is represented on.
I think this is splitting hairs really for the purposes of the part you quoted because whether you're talking about ontic structural realism or physicalism, you're not changing the central role of physical constructs in the universe amongst other constructs. If you look at people like James Ladyman, they are expressing the same kind of sentiment as in that quote; they try to produce a more rigorous characterization of reality which can essentially be used as a vehicle for their naturalism, empiricism.
I would say that information content isn't a thing in and of itself but is about what an observer can distinguish.
My point is not really 1 or 2 but an inversion of 2 - how can an observer infer the material content from the image.
The photo thing I think isn't so much supposed to be an analogy for the physical and mental per se but of the relationship between representations and the mediums that hold them. Perhaps a better way to put it is that the information is about what is being represented and nothing else. Experiences are representations of things in the outside world. If they had information about what is going on inside your head they would be bad representations and our neural architecture isn't designed to represent that information. There is no reason to expect that the representations of our experience should be reducible to whatever is going on inside our heads if they serve the proper function of representations.
These are good arguments against physicalism, apparently being deployed in support of physicalism. :roll:
Not at all, the metaphor has a completely physical basis so how can it be an argument against physicalism?
I think Mary's Room is a very good argument against the reducibility of experiences to physics but I don't think that it entails that this is because experiences are some kind of thing out in the world being missed out on.
I would expect that in principle we can derive Mary's reaction of "aha, now I know what it is like to see red" from a complete physical description of her brain processing. If her ability to see color is mediated by physical photoreceptors and physical communication via neurotransmission then her new knowledge of red is due to physics, not some unique experiential thing like qualia which she has a kind of special ability to detect. Similarly, her inability to make the reduction from red to physics is something that is a consequence of her brain activity and the type of information she is processing in that activity.
Her new knowledge of red then may not be a physical fact in the trivial sense that it is not part of her understanding of physics, but it is not necessarily a consequence of something about reality that is being missed in a particularly significant way. What she can or cannot perceive is a direct consequence of physics.
I don't think Dualism is a "faulty assumption" for dealing with complex reality (Epistemology). But I can agree with your implicit criticism of the common "metaphysical assumption" of a Matter/Mind partition, imagined as the ultimate & final fact of reality (Ontology). That binary perspective is prevalent because it's just commonsense to view a material object (Brain) and its metaphysical function (Mind) as two separate classes of things. Those discrete conceptual categories are also where Science (matter ; mode) and Philosophy (mind ; essence) divide and conquer.
However, in my own personal Ontology, and from a Cosmic perspective, there is only one universal "Essence" (substance) in the world. I'm referring to Spinoza's Substance Monism*1, in which everything in the world is a part of a unitary infinite Ultimate Essence : Deus sive Natura (God or Nature). In my own cosmology though, I call that peak of the pyramid : BEING*2. He used Aristotle's concept of "Substance" in the sense of an Essence (uniform Platonic Form) from which all physical & metaphysical forms (particular things) emerge.
I call my personal worldview Enformationism, because modern science has discovered that everything in the world can be reduced down to Information*3, in the sense of the creative power to transform, which we commonly call Energy. To Enform is to transform from undefined Potential into definite Actual things. Get it? : Energy (causation) + Information (program or code) = EnFormAction. Instead of Spinoza's term "God" though, I tend to refer to that Single Source of enforming power as The Programmer or The Enformer.
Therefore, my philosophical Ontology is Monistic, but for the practical purposes of Science, it's convenient to think in terms of tangible Matter/Physics/Quanta (the modes of Being), and to leave the intangibles Mind/Essence/Qualia for impractical Philosophy to wrestle with. You can call that compromise : Dualism within Monism (i.e. Parts within the Whole). :smile:
*1. Substance Monism :
[i]According to Spinoza, everything that exists is either a substance or a mode. A substance is something that needs nothing else in order to exist or be conceived. Substances are independent entities both conceptually and ontologically. A mode or property is something that needs a substance in order to exist, and cannot exist without a substance. . . . .
The most distinctive aspect of Spinozas system is his substance monism; that is, his claim that one infinite substanceGod or Natureis the only substance that exists.[/i]
https://iep.utm.edu/spinoz-m/
*2. BEING :
In my own theorizing there is one universal principle that subsumes all others, including Consciousness : essential Existence. Among those philosophical musings, I refer to the "unit of existence" with the absolute singular term "BEING" as contrasted with the plurality of contingent "beings" and things and properties. By BEING I mean the ultimate ground of being, which is simply the power to exist, and the power to create beings.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page10.html
*3. Information is :
***[i] Claude Shannon quantified Information not as useful ideas, but as a mathematical ratio between meaningful order (1) and meaningless disorder (0); between knowledge (1) and ignorance (0). So, that meaningful mind-stuff exists in the limbo-land of statistics, producing effects on reality while having no sensory physical properties. We know it exists ideally, only by detecting its effects in the real world. Physical Energy is the form of causal Information we are most familiar with.
*** For humans, Information has the semantic quality of aboutness , that we interpret as meaning. In computer science though, Information is treated as meaningless, which makes its mathematical value more certain. It becomes meaningful only when a sentient Self interprets it as such.
*** When spelled with an I, Information is a noun, referring to data & things. When spelled with an E, Enformation is a verb, referring to energy and processes.[/i]
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page11.html
But this is the hard problem, which suggests that a complete physical description of Mary's brain would not entail the experience of red.
Suppose there is a blind man, blind not because his eyes are defective, but because his brain lacks the ability to visualize. Suppose he learned every physical fact of Mary's neurology. Would he then know what it was like for Mary to see red for the first time? No, he cannot experience red, he lacks the requisite neural machinery. All the physical facts about light, light's interaction with brains, brains, cannot equal the subjective experience of red, as this experience depends on a brain able to generate it.
It is the it that is the hard problem. Generates is also problematic.
Intriguing! I have at times thought about conceptualizing reality in terms of information. I think I have quite a way to go before I can consider myself to have a precise well-thought out kind of manifesto about what I actually believe about reality or how I should view it. Still have to think out a lot of kinks.
And yes I agree with you in the sense that I don't think its necessary to get rid of a divide between mental concepts or the notion of experience vs. physical ones.
Yes, the physical description doesn't entail knowing what red is like and vice versa but notice how her saying "aha, I know what it is like to see red" is caused by brain activity which is causing her motor neurons to fire and let out those words. It is photoreceptors and neural activity as a consequence that allow her to even see red. Clearly, the only reason she knows what red is like is because of her biology.
Now imagine a p-zombie Mary, identical in every single way biologically except for the fact she does not have experiences. She hasn't got certain kinds of photoreceptors so she.. or her biological machinery at least... cannot distinguish wavelengths of light at all. She suddenly gets gene therapy which allows her to produce the pigments necessary to distinguish wavelengths of light ... "aha, now I know what its like to see red!". Zombie Mary is going to say this because she has identical Biological machinery to normal Mary even though she does not even have experiences. Not only that, but because she has the same biological machinery, the causal dynamics of brain activity is going to lead her to say things like "I cannot reduce these colors to the other physical facts I know about the world". Zombie Mary is going to know everything that Mary knows about her experiences without even having them. Without even having experiences she might be able to evem understand and anticipate other people's experiences... tell them that they will find a particular picture beautiful or that a perfume smells of a mix between strawberries and roses, which other people would agree with.
Isn't it strange that Zombie Mary knows all these things about experiences without having them. Does Mary actually having experiences make a difference to her knowledge of those experiences which come about due to neural activity? It doesn't seem so. Why would Zombie Mary find that experiential concepts are difficult to reduce to scientific concepts when she doesn't even have experiences?
This picture of a Zombie Mary is kind of incoherent in that a Zombie Mary knows all about experiences and Mary's actual experiences seem to have no causal effect on what she knows or even reports about her own experience. What this picture tells me is that even though Mary discovered something new, this has nothing to do with a novel thing appearing before her eyez but about changes in her brain. The reason why she might not be able to reduce this experience to physical concepts is similarly to do with the brain and the nature of the information the brain processes. I think this is closer to the idea that Mary gains a new ability rather than learning a new fact about something novel that exists in the universe.
The only way to make the picture coherent, so that Mary's experiences are not redundant when it comes to her knowledge of her own experiences, is to collapse the dualism between physical and mental. Her experiences and neural activity effectively must be the same thing to respect the fact that her experiences are causally efficacious but also that her biology is clearly what causes her information processing abilities and accounts for her knowledge of her experiences. The irreducibility we find then doesn't reflect an ontological distinction because clearly her seeing red for the first time isn't about a new different kind of thing to the physical. Instead, it is of an epistemic nature in the context of information processing in the brain/mind; she has physical and mental concepts which are constructed in a certain way, but these are concepts created effectively through statistical machine learning in her brain to understand what she perceives; they don't necessarily reflect the actual intrinsic nature of the world. She cannot perceive the intrinsic nature of the world that is independent of the particular structure of her senses or the brain/mind she that receives information from it.
This just restates the problem that is supposed to be revealed. And let's not dwell on Mary, I just mean the implications of any of these thought experiments. That is to say, it's not about the information processing, but why it is that the information processing is accompanied by "what it's like" qualities. That is to say, a zombie is basically behaving internally (neuronally) and externally (outward movements) just like a normal human, except there is no visuals, hearing, etc.
You can come back and say, that this makes no sense in some causal way that mental causes physical, or what not, but that is the point. What is it that there is mental causing or associating with anything physical?
One can't hide behind words like "integration" or "illusion" or any such thing because that always belies another thing that must be explained for what that is. In other words, one doesn't want to commit a homunculus fallacy of explaining away the problem by simply shifting it to another phenomenon that is subject to the same question (of "what" is the mental event X and why is it accompanying or how is it one and the same as the associated physical events?).
Quoting schopenhauer1
I disagree because the problem as usually is seen as telling us about ontology, and I am rejecting that view. The disparity in her concepts or in the types of information she perceives should not necessarily be equated to facts about the world of the world. This would assume she has direct access to the world, which she clearly doesn't because she is only capable of knowing or perceiving what she does because of the specific structure of her brain and how it interacts with the world. I think this is enough to say that her conceptualizations and knowledge cannot be seen as being objective.
Quoting schopenhauer1
For me, the purpose of the zombie thought experiment is that the idea that there is some separation between "what it's like" qualities and information processing is totally incoherent. If this were the case then it would render "what it's like" qualities totally causally redundant since the zombie with no experiences knows everything about the experiences their non-zombie counterpart has and comes out with the same philosophical quandries about the hard problen of those experiences (even though it doesn' have any). It makes no sense as it would mean that even though I am seeing and experiencing things right now, those visceral "what its likes" have no bearing on my knowledge and my reports about my own experiences.
At the same time, if brain activity is the cause of my reports and knowledge but is only caused by other physical causes then how am i getting knowledge of those disembodied experiences that are inherently different from and don't interact with the physical. The fact that my experiences and also my knowledge of those experiences line up is totally coincidence which seems absurd and requires a convoluted way of conceptualizing how reality works. This is a much deeper problem than simply the irreducibility of consciousness - another word for it is epiphenomenalism and it just seems totally an incoherent way of viewing how reality works. The simplest solution is that the separation between "what it's like" and information processing doesn't really exist - there is no duality.
Why do we still think of there being some inherent difference? Because our information processing apparatus makes us think there is; afterall, we do not have direct access to what the world is really like. I think a lot of philosophical thinking in this area seems to assume that we just have direct access to things but I don't see how this can be the case when our thought, perception, concepts depends directly on our brain. I don't even think we should assume that just because we experience something we have direct access to knowledge of what is actually going on. Why should we assume this kind of thing comes for free? Does it come for free for cats, insects, fish? I don't think our brain structure or perhaps even any type of brain structure can allow us to satisfactorily answer the question of "what" is mental event X. At the same time I think we can deduce logically that a fundamental dualism between the mental and physical could be illusory.
I don't disagree that there is a useful distinction to be made between the "image" and the physical photograph. We can think of the image as the "Shannon Entropy," a collection of variable discrete differences that is substrate independent.
But physicalism says that the physical subservienes on any such information. That is, all representation is representation only in virtue of the physical properties of the system that holds the representation. Thus, while we can abstract the picture from the photograph, and we can say that there are isomorphisms between different copies of the same image, these are causally irrelevant. All cause can be explained in purely physical terms, the causal closure principle.
So what you're describing seems to be more an argument against physicalism than a way to save physicalism. Physicalism without causal closure and superveniance doesn't seem to be physicalism. Physicalism says that everything that can be known about seeing red is physical. There is nothing else. Perhaps experiencing red is a different experience than knowing "how red is experienced." This is fine, but it's going to lead you to physicalism with type or predicate dualism (which may or may not be physicalism depending on who you ask).
Now you do have scientific theories where information is essential, "it from bit," views in physics, Deacon's "absential phenomena," which are born of what "is not physically present," etc. But generally information based ontologies, at least those that say that information is ontologically primitive, are taken to be "immateriality," and not physicalism.
If physicalism isn't going to fall to Hemple's dilemma and define itself as "just whatever currently has evidential support," it seems like it has to pick a hill to die on, and superveniance is the most obvious hill.
To be fair, I think similar sorts of problems show up for idealism. I am inclined to think that the problem might be substance metaphysics writ large, with both physicalism and idealism making the cardinal error of following Parmenides in thinking of static being-as-substance, instead of Parmenides being-as-flux-shaped-through-logos. Maybe these even helps get at cosmological issues because, while stabilities of matter have begining and end, the Logos is necessarily without beginning or end, as cause and effect is the ground from which before and after can even exist (for a bit of a non-sequitor).
Then indeed this is just another name for a form of panpsychism. If that is the case, then this poster was right:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Panpsychism has always been a problem for physicalism because it seems to be decidedly not what physicalists want to posit, but at the same time it is in no way ruled out by mainstream physicalism. Partly because no physicalism that precludes panpsychism has been developed that doesn't seem to spawn massive problems for the theorist. It isn't easy to say "mind exists, but it can only exist in some places," without knowing what it is that "causes," mind. But that's exactly the unfortunate position a physicalist who wants to deny panpsychism finds themselves in.
To be honest, it's really weird to me how physicalism is the most popular ontology writ large, but in the context of metaphysics as a specialty it's like a battleship that's taken direct multiple direct torpedo hits, is listing to one side, its magazine blew, and it looks liable to break in half. I think what that tells us is just how unattractive the alternatives are lol. It might be sinking, but the lifeboats are filled with holes too.
Perhaps it can be attributed to what I'll call "naive materialism". That is to say, if you were to never consider the hard problem, and you go about your everyday thinking about the world as a "modern" scientifically-minded person, you just assume various scientifically informed processes are the metaphysical basis of various phenomena. Thus, consciousness is clearly neuronal and other biological processes, without considering how it is that these processes are "what it's like" experiential qualities.
For some people, it's not even grasping the hard problem because they are so used to the easy-problem framework of how problems are supposed to be solved.
It's as if when writing up blueprints for a house, you forgot the house is 3-dimensional.
I don't see any real problem. Panpsychism seems like nothing more than an unfalsifiable hypothesis that has no significant explanatory value, and Ockham razor seems like sufficient justification for dismissing panpsychism. From my perspective panpsychism doesn't seem to present any more challenge than solipsism.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
This seems to me, more a matter of unrealistic expectations on the part of critics of physicalism, than it seems a problem for physicalism. Brains are enormously complex, and I say this as an electrical engineer who routinely deals with highly complex systems. Yes there is a huge way to go in developing a understanding of how brains instantiate minds, and no guarantee that human minds are up to the task of developing something approaching an ultimate explanatory theory. However, substantial explanatory progress has been made over my lifetime, and that progress is ongoing. I don't see how anything similar can be claimed for panpsychism.
In any case, I'm interested in hearing more about what you see as "massive problems" for physicalism.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Well, philosophers have proven themselves capable of believing all sorts of weird things, and this appears to me to be an example of such. I think physicalism (in a general sense) is in about as much danger as the heliocentrism of the solar system.
If everything intrinsically has some form of first-person subjective experience that would explain why there is first person subjective experience. We still need to explain why some entities have more depth of experience than others, but not experience itself, since it is an unanalyzable primitive. That would seem to be the explanatory value. Knowledge of the brain already does shed much light on why it is that different people experience subjective life differently, so this seems like a far more tractable problem. At least that's the argument panpsychists give; I am not terribly convinced.
I think you've misread my point. My point was that physicalism/panpsychism isn't a mutually exclusive dichotomy. If we discovered some sort of empirically observable phyche particle or property of mass/energy that suffuses the universe, and we were able to associate that with the emergence of first-person experience on a level with our own, we would say "aha, that's the physical entity related to consciousness."
Panpsychism doesn't posit a suis generis substance responsible for consciousness; most formulations just say that subjective experience is a property of physical substance, period. So, the problem isn't that I expect physicalism to debunk panpsychism, it's that, if the physicalist wants to say "panpsychism is not commensurate with physicalism," they have to explain why this is the case. On the face of it, there doesn't seem to be any ontological reason for this to be the case. But it's much harder to explain what consciousness can't be caused by if you don't know what it is caused by.
I agree with the rest of what you said. And perhaps this critique just reduces to Hempel's Dilemma. After all, if we had solid scientific evidence of psychic powers or ghosts, physicalists would probably also want to point to the mechanisms by which we found those phenomena to work and say "see, look, ghosts are physical, it's the physical ectoplasm that explains it." But then the problem is that physicalism has just turned out to be "whatever there is widespread support for." The key problem there is that, at least in physics, and at least for those that publish metaphysically minded papers and books, it seems that the scientists who should be guiding "scientific realism" towards physicalism have a tendency to advocate for ontologies that don't seem very physicalist (e.g. "It From Bit," ontic structural realism/Platonism, etc.)
See: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/
But note that these are philosophical problems with coherently defining physicalism, not empirical arguments against it. Physicalism can move along so well despite these because they aren't issues that concern most people. Also, part of the reason it has received so many wounds is simply because it is popular. If another ontology became as popular it would probably also have more people analyzing it, which would then lead to more problems being identified.
Consider:
1. Physicalism is true at a possible world w iff any world which is a physical duplicate of w is a duplicate of w simpliciter.
2. Physicalism is true at a possible world w iff every property instantiated at w is necessitated by a physical property.
Further, consider that if the physical supervenes on all mental events we could as easily flip the script and say that the mental supervenes on all related physical events. And yet physicalism generally wants to say that only one set is relevant for causal explanations, thus we need something more than mere supervenience.
Also, supervenience itself seems unable to deal with a process-based metaphysics. It is an idea born of substance thinking. However, the natural sciences have overwhelmingly tended to move away from substance explanations: heat is now thought of in terms of average motion not caloric, combustion is a process not the substance phlogiston, atoms have a beginning and end and will eventually decay, they are patterns of mass energy not primary substances, "fundamental" particles are now often thought of as mere patterns in a field, etc.
Of course, not all physicalism is supervenience physicalism, but it is what most people generally mean by the term. Second, if what is physically not present has causal power, as in information theoretic ontologies, absential phenomena, etc., then this seems to violate the causal closure principle as it is commonly put forth for physicalism (although it might be recoverable through reformulation). Really, if information is "the ontological basement" as some physicists contend, or even if it is fundamental, "coequal with energy" as others assert, it is hard to see how classical physicalism's causal closure principle works, even if reformulated in process terms.
IMO, it's unclear is a "process physicalism" is worthy of the name. Physicalism always struct me as a substance metaphysics, partly because of how it came to define itself historically in terms of an opposition to substance dualism.
Or consider:
But of course if there are "physical" and "topic-neutral properties" then we actually have two types of things.
I began to "conceptualize reality in terms of information" about 15 years ago, when a quantum physicist --- studying the material foundation of reality --- exclaimed that he had just realized "it's all information!". His, oh-by-the-way exclamation led me back to John A. Wheeler's 1989 "it from bit" postulation*1. What he meant by that cryptic quip is : every-thing (its ; material stuff) in the world can be reduced down to binary information (bits ; mind stuff). That equation of mind & matter would not go down well with committed Materialists though, because it opened the door to such spooky ideas as "mind over matter" (magic).
I don't see any reliable evidence of spooky magical powers in the world --- other than deception by distraction, by manipulating information --- but it is evident that the human mind has gained almost magical*2 control over the natural world by the application of Mind Power (the power of ideas)*3 in completely mundane sense. An idea begins as a bit of information in a mind (noumena), then is expressed in the material form of sounds & text (seeds), which then is trans-planted into other minds (memes), and eventually is transformed into action (energy), and finally into physical form (phenomena).
One way to "conceptualize reality" in terms of Information is to think about how the Big Bang created material & mental reality from nothing more than a Singularity (program code). The EnFormAction hypothesis*4 is my own "manifesto". It's an extrapolation from E=MC^2 ; to Causal Information ; to Teleological Evolution ; to the current state of reality that is changing faster than we can comprehend it. The Webb telescope is now allowing us to look back in time, to gain information about the beginning of Time itself. From top to bottom, reality is all about the creative power to enform*5 ; to transform reality into ideality. :smile:
*1. John Archibald Wheeler Postulates "It from Bit" :
"It from bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom at a very deep bottom, in most instances an immaterial source and explanation
https://historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=5041
*2. Almost Magical :
Compared to natural processes prior to the emergence of the human Mind, and thence the formalization of information.
https://gnomon.enformationism.info/Images/Cosmic%20Progression%20Graph.jpg
*3. The Power of Ideas :
"Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come." ___Victor Hugo, on Political Revolution
Note : Vlad Putin's motivating idea (irresistible force) of a re-unified Russian Empire has encountered a countervailing idea (immovable object) in the sovereign nation of Ukraine.
"Right now it's only a notion, but I think I can get the money to make it into a concept, and later turn it into an idea". ___Woody Allen
"Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard". ___Guy Kawasaki
Note : Information is easy to find, but hard to implement into novel forms.
*4. The EnFormAction Hypothesis :
Therefore, as a hypothesis, I accepted the axiom of a First Cause as a reasonable premise, and began to follow the dots through history. And since this new creation myth is grounded on our modern understanding of pluripotential Information, I use a lot of computer-related analogies and terms. Clearly, the Cosmos was not created as a perfect fait accompli, but as an ongoing process working toward consummation.
https://bothandblog3.enformationism.info/page23.html
*5. What is Information? :
So, in answer to a request for a general definition, as it pertains to inorganic (physical), organic (biological), and semantic types of information, I have defined Information in the context of various real-world instances of ubiquitous enforming power.
https://bothandblog6.enformationism.info/page16.html
"Information is neither matter nor energy, although it needs matter to be embodied and energy to be communicated" ___The Information Philosopher
Information and causation are one and the same thing
___Giulio Tononi , Phi
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
This doesn't violate causal closure due to the fact that everything about the world we create are models or constructs which depend on various contexts. The fact that I can create various different models of the world at different scales and levels of abstraction doesn't have a bearing on causal closure in this context.
I think people's characterizations of physicalism are generally quite vague which is why so many people are intuitive physicalists despite this criticism you gave which would trivially refute the strict characterizations of physicalism you and perhaps many other philosophers give it. I would look at physicalism more in terms of how central our physics models appear in our view of the natural sciences and therefore the world which is totally coherent with the idea of having various levels of abstraction.
Information is another abstraction and any notion of information depends on the ability for an observer or detector to make distinctions; information is therefore not really a thing but is something that can be characterized in the interaction between a stimulus and observer / detector. What this means is that any notion of information would be at least implicitly embodied in the physical processes that enable an observer to make distinctions (e.g. so that I can recognize a photo or a neuron can selectively respond to different inputs): the information is physical, just not in any way independent of an observer.
The thing about what you're saying is that it suggests that our notion of ontology about reality should be limited by our inherent capacity to perceive or think about it which I don't think is the case. The fact that I can conceptualize reality with both mental and physical concepts or that there are limits to how I can directly perceive reality should not necessarily be confused with reality itself.
In fact, I can plausibly imagine a completely physical world where you have a physical machine which receives sensory inputs about the world, learns their statistical structure and creates theories about the world. I can totally imagine trivial contexts where that machine would be incapable of explaining aspects of its own inputs and reconciling them with its own physical models... would that entail the physical world exists in has things that are not physical? No, its just the limits on what a machine can explain.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
As said in a previous post, I think that the idea of fundamental ontology is inaccessible to us, perhaps cannot be made coherent. My characterization of physicalism is more about the role of our models of physics and I guess the natural sciences more generally
in our view of reality and arguing against the need to posit ontologically separate mental phenomena above and beyond them.
I think though that fundamentally, our natural sciences seem to characterize the nature of the universe with physics in a way that doesn't depend on the notion of experience. It is not needed for those models to work and would be adding something in addition which isn't required and doesn't make a difference to our understanding of the universe. I think therefore physicalism is more appropriate than panpsychism.
I think you are making the hidden dualism mistake here. Check the OP of this thread:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14569/hidden-dualism/p1
Specifically this:
Quoting schopenhauer1
I don't think there is anything problematic in entertaining both the mental and physical as concepts that we have constructed due to the nature of our brains.
The problem isn't entertaining both but replacing one with the other without explanation. You said:
"embodied in the physical processes that enable an observer to make distinctions"
That is placing the observer in the equation without explanation, as supposedly in physicalism, the explanation is somehow physical regarding the "observer". That is begging the question.
What do you mean?
I mean what I said ha.
But if you are asking me to explain more.. You said, "...physical processes that enable an observer to make distinctions".
Physical processes are supposed to explain the observer. The way you said it there, the observer is already in the equation, and so was not explained.
I don't see the problem. It seems to me that under your characterization, physicalism would be falsified if there existed any concepts that were not physical: e.g. organisms, economies, mountains. They are all just labels that describe our empirical observations at different scales nd levels of abstraction. I can think of an observer the same way, I just mean more or less something that can respond differently to different inputs. That seems to be the kind of minimal characterization of information processing.
Well we are having a philosophical discussion, so paying attention to these distinctions matter in the dialectic and debates at hand.
So you said:
Quoting Apustimelogist
Well, you are doing it again. "Concepts" is a loaded word there and you are going to start going down a rabbit-hold of a different debate regarding how concepts represent the world. It's advised to be careful with language here...
Rather, the issue at hand is how it is that mental phenomena are physical events. It's not an issue of what mental event is associated with a physical event (the easy problems), but the hard problem, why it is that some physical events have this mental quality to them, other than just asserting that they do. It would even have to explain hidden dualisms such as "illusion that's why!" because the illusion now has to be explained.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Ok that is a little more precise. Right, information processes.. But this doesn't really solve the problem I mentioned earlier in the last post about mixing behavior/process and mental (what it's like aspects).
Thus information can process with no "what it's likeness" to it. It is just behavior all the way down. And wherever there is "what it's likeness" happening, "what" then is that as opposed to the other behavior that was going on? Then you are back to a dualism of some sort of mental space that pops out of physical space which is basically the question all over again.
Hello Apustimelogist,
Just a some things I would like to clarify about the hard problem of consciousness:
1. It is technically, at best, only a problem for reductive physicalism. One could be a irreductive or elimativistic physicalist (although I personally find other problems with them).
2. There is no such thing as refutation in metaphysics (and thusly not in philosophy of mind): no one can claim that physicalism is refuted by anything but, rather, they can describe reasons that they think count against the theory.
3. Due to the nature of metaphysics, one can reconcile even reductive physicalism with the hard problem, even when granted it as true, because one can metaphysically justify virtually anything. Thusly, a person could say that it is expected that consciousness would not be reducible to the brain states since they are, after all, the representations. However, the idea in using the hard problem as an epistemic token against reductive physicalism is that it makes it significantly less coherent or at least less plausible: all we directly know is mental (and not physical) and if one is conceding that they cannot explain reductively mentality, then it appears as though nothing one directly knows can be sufficiently explained. The trade off, allegedly, is that the theory fits with the rest of our knowledge; but why would we posit this extraneous physicality when we can reductively explain it in the reverse direction? Anyways, the idea here (that I am trying to convey) is that metaphysics is all about tradeoffs: what counts in favor and against the theory?
4. If mentality is not explanatorily reduced to physicality, then what reasons does one have to believe it is reducible to it (in theory)? Thats like me saying this property A is reducible to B but that I can never prove it: so why think that is actually the case?
My view isn't so much about falsifying qualia but about whether our concepts of qualia and their irreducibility can plausibly arise through information processing. If that is the case then it strongly suggests to me that dualism is an illusion because it would entail epiphenomenalism which is absurd. On the other hand it suggests one might be able to defend the identity between brain processes and qualia even if one cannot be reduced to the other. This would allow a physicalist to defend the notion that everything is physical, or more specifically that nothing extra is needed to describe reality.
Its all about the meta-problem of consciousness. If it is plausible for a physical statistical learning architecture to generate experiential concepts but be incapable of reducinh (correction) them to its knowledge of the physical world then it seems to render the role of phenomena in our knowledge of our own consciousness as epiphenomenal and absurd. The idea that a representation would not carry information about what physically instantiates that representation is one suggestion about why some kind of statistical learning architecture would not be able to reduce or explain experiential concepts it might generate.
I am unfamiliar with a 'meta-problem' of consciousness; but I don't find it plausible that 'learning architecture' will ever be conscious.
It seems to take more than merely quantitatively generating a 'experiential concept' (whatever that may be) to have qualitative experience. There is something it is like in and of itself to have qualia, which is not something mere algorithms can produce (at least there's no foreseeable conceptual explanation of how it would work at all). A very easy way of seeing the incredibly difficulty in giving a conceptual account of the reduction of mental properties to physical properties is mary's room.
What AI will end up being is a philosophical zombie--a really convincing mimick of proper minds.
Yeah and how about that theory? How does it "arise"? "What" is it that is "arisen"?
Quoting Apustimelogist
That's only one form of dualism and even that is not entailed in physicalism. Physicalism doesn't have room for mental events other than hidden dualism (has been my premise for a while).
Quoting Apustimelogist
I think that isn't much of an argument other than we don't know. That is again, only one form of dualism, and it's one that's prone to physicalist accounts because it starts with the physical causing mental.
Emergence does have to be explained here. How is it that emergent properties exist prior to the viewer, and all that. It's bald assertion to just say that "and it emerges", it's about as explanatory as saying, "it's an illusion".
Quoting schopenhauer1
Well I am just talking about the concept of qualia and the inability for some kind of statistical learning machine to explain their own concepts; for instance, because those concepts are too primitive and they are representations which do not carry information about how those representations are instantiated. For instance, if you look at how some neural network works where input units cause states of hidden units to change through weights and thresholds etc, you might consider the network to learn about information in those inputs but theres no viable mechanism that would allow it to learn about and represent how that information is instantiated.
Quoting schopenhauer1
The point I'm trying to say there is that it would entail epiphenomenalism and epiphenomenalism is absurd so it cant be the case. It may allow some form of dualism where the physical and mental interact but i generally find this implausible because there is just no evidence or suggestion from science that this is or should be the case.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Its not an "I don't know". Dualism is either not empirically motivated or incoherent. This incoherence can be seen in the idea of a p-zombie which says it is conscious and believes in the hard problem of consciousness.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Emergence presumes dualism which I am not doing. I am saying there is no dualism.
Its not about generating consciousness but the idea that if something putatively non-experiential can generate experiential concepts, this leads to absurdities which make dualism implausible. P-zombies are an example of such absurdities. Of p-zombies are biologically identical to us they will say they have consciousness and have thoughts on the hard problem of consciousness even if they don't have experiences. This is absurd which can then be used as an argument against dualism.
Although I am not sure I am fully understanding your connection of dualism to your original OP, an argument against dualism does not count in favor of physicalism (if that is what you are suggesting here).
Also, I likewise find dualism to be quite implausible, but I am not a physicalist.
Well the way I stated it in the OP was meant to just be a counterargument against irreducibility so that a physicalist could use it. But I think my view here is mostly just an argument against dualism. I don't think I am truly a physicalist, and clearly from various replies in this thread it can be seen there are some deep issues with turning the intuition of physicalism into a cohesive viewpoint but its the kind of intuition or view that reflects well on my sympathies so I often put myself on that side in a debate that can very polarized.
At the same time, as I have said in several posts in the thread, I also don't think we can have access to a good characterization of what a fundamental ontology could be. In light of this, I don't think my view of reality has a real base, it is just filled with the models we have from the natural sciences and how they relate to each other; my inclination then is that embracing ontologies centered around experience add to this network of models in ways that are either not necessary or not very interesting/useful from my standpoint.
I feel like my views don't need something more to explain existence because it appears to me from various areas of philosophy and neuroscience that as observers we are just naturally limited in how we can think and characterize the world and so there are just things about existence we cannot have epistemic access to in a coherent way. We cannot ever look at the world in a way that is independent of how our brains have been structured, the things that they are capable of doing and their limits.
Edited: paragraphing, "intuition of physicalism", "have epistemic access to"
Yes, Information is inter-dependent. It's physical, in the sense that it is transmitted from mind to mind via physical vehicles (ink, sound, rhodopsin, etc). But information is also metaphysical, in the sense that Shannon defined it in terms of statistical probability (potential, correlations, not-yet-real).
In its statistical state, Information is not a material thing, but --- as you implied above --- it is reified*1 as a "distinction" by an observer. Even more spooky, is that Information is an intentional process (an act) --- the "-ation" part of the word is an abbreviation for "action". So, Information is both an "abstraction" process in a mind, and the embodiment of an idea in matter.
EnFormAction*2 is the bridge between Noumena and Phenomena. A spectator on the sideline contributes the metaphysical component to physical information in the playing-field of the environment. Hence, the meaning of Information is dependent on the mind of the observer. Thus, my position on the phenomena/noumena controversy is BothAnd*3. :smile:
*1. To Reify :
reification transforms objects into subjects and subjects into objects
When an abstraction (abstract belief or hypothetical construct) is treated as if it were a concrete, real event or physical entity
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Reification
*2. EnFormAction :
[i]En- within ; referring to essential changes of state
Form- to mold or give shape to : it's the structure of a thing that makes it what it is.
Action- causation : the suffix -ation denotes the product or result of an action.[/i]
https://bothandblog2.enformationism.info/page29.html
*3. The BothAnd Principle :
Conceptually, the BothAnd principle is similar to Einstein's theory of Relativity, in that what you see ? whats true for you ? depends on your perspective, and your frame of reference; for example, subjective or objective, religious or scientific, reductive or holistic, pragmatic or romantic, conservative or liberal, earthbound or cosmic. Ultimate or absolute reality (ideality) doesn't change, but your conception of reality does. Opposing views are not right or wrong, but more or less accurate for a particular purpose.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page10.html
Cool stuff, but I think it goes too far. Enthusiasm for the subject doesn't pull the rabbit out of the hat, unfortunately. That is to say abstraction already needs the observer. Abstraction isn't the observer. If it is, then that has to be explained, and like "illusion" or "integration", it all becomes hidden dualisms of begging the question.
I think the point of the quote is that Abstraction is a function of the Observer's data-filtering belief-forming system. Hence, not so much a Dualism but merely different aspects of the same process : interpreting incoming sensory information. Reality is complicated, but perception automatically simplifies our sensory signals into parcels (e.g. Gestalts), in part by omitting unnecessary data*1; before it appears into consciousness. Observing is Interpreting.
This subtraction of unnecessary irrelevant data, and integration of relevant data into Concepts, is related to Don Hoffman's Theory of Perception*2. The Observer is separated (at arm's length) from the environment by his own built-in data-compression algorithms. The brain's programs (procedures) & memories (beliefs) are designed, not for absolute Truth, but for pragmatic Facts. Thus, the stripped-down mental model of reality is good enough to enhance the survival of living organisms.
The Abstract model (a belief) is an Idealized (unrealistic) & Integrated (holistic) representation of Reality, not a glimpse of Heaven or ding an sich. It's a Dualism only in the sense that a Map is not the Terrain. However, the question remains : how does a neural map become conscious knowledge? I have a monistic/holistic hypothesis, but it may not appeal to those committed to reductive methods for answering philosophical questions. :smile:
PS__ I just read two articles about Creative Emergence*3*4, in which novel structures (e.g. conscious Brain/Mind systems) emerge from the convoluted interactions of subatomic particles & forces. Maybe Perception/Conception is an example of subtractive Divergence, on top of additive Emergence. But that might require a new thread.
*1.Data compression is a reduction in the number of bits needed to represent data. Compressing data can save storage capacity, speed up file transfer and decrease costs for storage hardware and network bandwidth.
https://www.techtarget.com/searchstorage/definition/compression
*2. Conscious Perception :
. . . . our perception of the world is not accurate. In reality, it is a simplified representation and projection of something more complex that our brains have created for us. He argues that our perceptions are optimized for survival and reproductive success (so-called fitness functions) rather than for providing an accurate depiction of reality.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2023/05/11/how-the-theory-of-conscious-agents-can-revolutionize-your-leadership/?sh=5eff0ca52318
*3. Did physicists get the idea of fundamental wrong? :
theres a difference between phenomena that are fundamental like the motions and interactions of the indivisible, elementary quanta that compose our Universe and phenomena that are emergent, arising solely from the interactions of large numbers of fundamental particles under a specific set of conditions.
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/physicists-fundamental-wrong/
*4. Novelty is Emergent :
How does the new come about? This is the fundamental question of creativity
https://emergentfutureslab.com/blog/systems-are-creative
Hello Apustimelogist,
Oh I see! Yes, I agree that dualism is not a coherent way to go, for sure.
I actually think I more or less agree with a fair amount you talk about in the last two posts you make about information and the "arms-length" separation of observer, though maybe I would describe it in different language. I definitely do have a different perspective but there is definitely stuff I agree on, I think.
I thonk you are begging the question by presuming dualism, presuming some separation that needs to be explained. My belief is dualism is false and so there is nothing to be explained but at the same time, there's nothing stopping me from having concepts of both the mental, the physical, or various other things.
I understand that my discussions of the Mind vs Matter question may be difficult to follow, in part because I have no formal training in Philosophy, and partly because most of my knowledge of Information is derived from Quantum Physics instead of Shannon's mathematical theory of communication. Another hurdle in communicating my ideas about a Monistic theory of Mind/Matter is that I have been forced, by the complexity of the content, to coin neologisms (new language) that bundle contrasting concepts into single words : e.g. EnFormAction and Enformy.
The bottom line though, is that both physical Matter (phenomena) and metaphysical Mind (noumena) are derivatives from the pre-Big Bang essential causal Power to Enform (to create and to transform), that we now know scientifically as Energy. But, from my information-centric perspective, I call it EnFormAction or Enformy*1. Of course, religious-minded folks call it "God", or "Will of God". Philosophically, this notion is related to Plato's concept of an ideal realm of FORM, which is similar to Kant's hidden reality of ding an sich. It's also similar to Spinoza's & Aristotle's definition of essential Single Substance*2 as the First Cause of the Cosmos.
That hypothetical eternal pool of Potential is unitary (monistic), but everything Actual in the real world is pluralistic*3, beginning with a dualistic distinction between This & That; before & after, Self & Other. Dualism is exemplified in the first stage of cell division, when one thing becomes two, and two further divides into the variety of parts of a holistic organism*4. The human Observer sees the Cosmos as a Part trying to understand the Whole*5. :smile:
*1. Enformy :
[i]In the Enformationism theory, Enformy is a hypothetical, holistic, metaphysical, natural trend or force, that counteracts Entropy & Randomness to produce complexity & progress. [ see post 63 for graph ]
1. I'm not aware of any "supernatural force" in the world. But my Enformationism theory postulates that there is a meta-physical force behind Time's Arrow and the positive progress of evolution. Just as Entropy is sometimes referred to as a "force" causing energy to dissipate (negative effect), Enformy is the antithesis, which causes energy to agglomerate (additive effect).
2. Of course, neither of those phenomena is a physical Force, or a direct Cause, in the usual sense. But the term "force" is applied to such holistic causes as a metaphor drawn from our experience with physics.
3. "Entropy" and "Enformy" are scientific/technical terms that are equivalent to the religious/moralistic terms "Evil" and "Good". So, while those forces are completely natural, the ultimate source of the power behind them may be supernatural, in the sense that the First Cause logically existed before the Big Bang.[/i]
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html
*2. Aristotles Substance" :
In one sense, substances are the fundamental subjects; in another sense, a substance is the cause of being of a substance in the first sense. A substance in the second sense is the essence (the what it is to be), the form (morphê or eidos), of a substance in the first sense.
https://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/SubstanceNote.pdf
*3. What is the philosophy of the one and many? :
The problem of finding the one thing that lies behind all things in the universe is called the problem of the one and the many. Basically stated, the problem of the one and the many begins from the assumption that the universe is one thing. Because it is one thing, there must be one, unifying aspect behind everything.
https://www.faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabel/Courses/Phil%20281b/Philosophy%20of%20Magic/Dante.%20etc/Philosophers/Idea/www.wsu.edu_8080/~dee/GLOSSARY/ONEMANY.HTM
*4. Cell Division Duality within Unity :
Out of Unity comes Plurality. But the potential for multiplication is inherent in the One.
*5. Physics vs Philosophy :
Reductionism vs Holism ; Part vs Whole ; Mechanism vs System
That's an interesting way to phrase the "hard problem" of "what it's likeness". A computer can mechanically process information without bothering with mentally processing the mathematical data into personal (self relevant) meanings. Brainy Animals seem to be able to compute likeness (analogies) to some degree (gestures, behaviors), but not to the point of intentionally communicating meanings from mind to mind in the concise packages of intention we call "words".
Likewise, the whole universe can be imagined as a computer*1 : mechanically processing mathematical information into the physics that scientists study. But, until homo sapiens eventually became Self-Conscious, there was no "what it's likeness" as postulated by Nagel. "Likeness" is the ability to make analogies & metaphors to represent experienced reality in abstract concepts. Animals seem to know what they are doing, but are not able to articulately enform other minds with that personal knowledge. The abstractions we call "words" require analytical abilities that allow precise control of conveyed meaning --- including more than just blunt emotions (danger!), but sharp reasons (look behind you, there's a monkey eagle).
So, the "hard problem" of Consciousness --- to know that you know, and to let someone else know --- is only a problem for humans, who strongly desire to communicate subjective ideas & feelings to other minds*2, in a manner that is not too vague (gestures), and can be objectively tested (philosophy). After a football game, the on-the-field reporter points a microphone at the winning athlete, and asks "what is it like?". An animal answer would be, "it feels good, you know". No, I don't know! I don't have endorphins stimulating my body. Hence, the Hard Problem. :smile:
PS___For humans, the dualism of Consciousness is Self vs Other, not necessarily Natural vs Supernatural, as typically argued.
*1, Universe is a Computer :
This leads to the extraordinary possibility that our entire Universe might in fact be a computer simulation. The idea is not that new. In 1989, the legendary physicist, John Archibald Wheeler, suggested that the Universe is fundamentally mathematical and it can be seen as emerging from information.
https://www.sciencealert.com/expert-proposes-a-method-for-telling-if-we-all-live-in-a-computer-program
*2. problem of other minds, in philosophy, the problem of justifying the commonsensical belief that others besides oneself possess minds and are capable of thinking or feeling somewhat as one does oneself.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/problem-of-other-minds
You speak of secondary consciousness. Primary consciousness is also "what it's likeness", but it is not conceptual or self-aware to the kind or degree of humans. There is something of what it's like for a dog to sniff a scent, or hear a command, and what's it like for a bat to send and receive echo locations, etc. A "what it's like" is to have an experience of the world. You don't have to know you are having an experience.
What its likeness exists in other animals, and surely existed before homo sapiens showed up. Nagel used the bat as an example. Things happen to rocks. But the rock has no subjective experience of the things that happen to it. There is nothing it is like to be a rock from the rocks pov, because the rock has no pov.
Things happen to a bat. And the bat has subjective experiences of the things that happen to it. There is something it is like to be a bat from the bats pov, because the bat has a pov.
I didn't realize that Consciousness had so many degrees, like a PhD. I suppose an earthworm, nosing thru the soil has minimal consciousness -- taste & touch -- like a kindergarten degree. Even an amoeba, with no obvious organs, also seems to be sensitive to touch & taste. Apparently, once life (animation) emerged on Earth, consciousness began to evolve, in complexity & sensitivity, in order to enhance survival probability.
Sentience is now at the point where humans can send artificial sensors to Moon & Mars to experience those alien environments. But, although scientists know what Consciousness does, they can't say for sure what it is, essentially. My philosophical thesis suggests that human Consciousness is a high evolutionary stage of causal Energy, combined with directional Enformy*1. :smile:
*1. Enformy : antithesis of Entropy (negentropy); a directional form of Energy
In the Enformationism theory, Enformy is a hypothetical, holistic, metaphysical, natural trend or force, that counteracts Entropy & Randomness to produce complexity & progress. [ see post 63 for graph ]. I'm not aware of any "supernatural force" in the world. But my Enformationism hypothesis postulates that there is a meta-physical force behind Time's Arrow and the positive progress of evolution. Just as Entropy is sometimes referred to as a "force" causing energy to dissipate (negative effect), Enformy is the antithesis, which causes energy to agglomerate (additive effect).
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html
Yes, events happen to a rock, but the rock doesn't seem to feel it ; to be moved by it --- unless you count gravity & momentum. In humans, the basis of Consciousness is emotion, to be mentally memorially changed by an experience, not literally physically moved by impetus. :smile:
... and our inside world. We are also conscious of our thinking, feelings ... whatever happens in us.
Without taking that into consideration any analysis and description of consciousness is incomplete and leads to unreliable results and/or conclusions.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Such a kind of representation is unreliable and futile. Consciousness is not a physical thing --i.e. non- physical in its nature-- and it is not created by or resides in the brain or other physical means as Science falsely claims. The brain is only a link between consciousness and the outside world. As you correctly said, consciousness is based on perception (senses), as far as the external world is concerned, and for that to work. a brain is required.
A lot of neuroscientists today "admit" that and also the widely accepted by now hard problem of consciousness, which escapes from the vast majority of scientists.
As for the rest and larger part of your description, as I said, it is based on an incomplete if not false view of consciousness and, by extension, our experiences, or "experiencing", as I prefer to call, which refers to a dynamic process.
Hi. I see your point. The physical world exists but we can never know the true nature of what we are looking at because it is a figment exclusive to the species that "sees it." The sensory systems evolutionarily speaking became capable of registering data according to how the species interacts with the environment. The stimuli that have various types of emissions correspond to pressure, sound waves, chemical, and light which stimulate the sensory apparatuses that result in representations in the brain (transduction). A baby for instance cannot see the full range of colour when they are born. It takes about 5 months to develop to the extent of adults. It takes time to develop as it interacts with the environment. But, evolution does play a role because how else would the baby have acquired vision in the first place which is nothing but electromagnetic frequency stimulating the retina via the cones to project an image in the mind?
Quoting Apustimelogist
That is an interesting point but evolution is sometimes a gradual process that happens when the body and mind interact with the environment. Thus, it just creates whatever has shaped its chassis. In other words it indiscriminately develops for no rhyme or reason. But, we need a system in our brains that is effective to organizing the outside world's as manifested by our sensations so that the species can continue to reproduce and propagate their genes. It is a process that involves many factors that intersect to create the brain and the body as we know it. In other words, it does not have a purpose, it just changes according to many factors.
I imagine that is so, too, but how do you know it is true?
What I was trying to get at is that there was what its likeness before there were homo sapiens. What you are describing here:Quoting Gnomonis not the likeness Nagel is describing. Hes just saying there is something it is like to be a bat. A bat has subjective experience. He is not saying a bat has the ability to make analogies & metaphors.
Yes, thats what I was getting at in my last post.
Inference. Why not believe everyones a zombie then? Im not sure the implication but if its that humans only have access to mental events, Id turn that question right around but without the imagine that is so, too.
If we accept a Representationalist paradigm (which I believe is the only coherent metaphysical stance) then how is it possible to know "what trees in the outside world are made of"? Surely we only 'know' our constructed biophysical representations of the observed putative bit of reality we have labelled as a tree. These may be conceptual rather than perceptual, but are still representations ... and as I think you point out, representations are different from their representata. Failure to acknowledge that the physical is most coherently categorised as a form of representation is Physicalism's fundamental fallacy. Incidentally a parallel criticism can be made of Psychism.
If we are confined to our representations in such a neo-Kantian way, how is it possible to make any ontological claims about what reality 'really' is? To know/experience is to represent. So we cannot logically claim that reality is physical, psychical, informational, whatever. All we can do is represent it in convenient ways depending on our purposes, and all these modes have their uses.
I am reminded of Bohr's admonition to Einstein about not telling God what to do: we should stop telling reality what it should be. Isn't it anthropocentric and hubristic to claim that reality is as we experience it? I prefer the more modest epistemic claim of us having efficacious models of reality. But am I open to the challenge of hypocrisy by positing such a metaphysical stance as the way the world is? I don't think so, because I am not positing an ontological proposition, only claiming that Representationalism is the most coherent metaphysical representation I have found ... an epistemological proposition. For instance the Hard Problem dissolves: the bits of reality we call bio-agents don't consist of different onticities, they just need (at least) two modes of representation, mind/psychical and brain/physical. Neural correlations of consciousness are to be expected since the two modes have the same referent, but there is no substantive primacy (eg mind emerging from a sub-stratal brain). The dualism is not an ontologically irreconcilable one, but an epistemic one allowing informational correspondence between the two modes. What's not to like?
Yes, animals also seem to experience "what it's likeness". But we only know that by inference from animal behavior that is analogous to human behavior while experiencing such "likeness" as pain. Nagel wasn't talking about bat metaphors, because we have no way of knowing what they are thinking. So anything we say about animal mentality will be by analogy to human ideation.
That's why I, not Nagel, suggested that animals probably share the human ability to create analogies & metaphors. But I can't prove it without getting inside the mind of a bat, to see what it's like from the bat's POH (point-of-hear). Or until bats begin to share their inner imagery in poetic similies that humans can understand. Til then, we will just have to guess "what it's like to be a bat", silently soaring in the dusky dark, and seeing fleeting flying bugs with sensuous sonar barks. :smile:
The salient problem is how to determine what the "what it is like" really is. It is not self-evident that it is a real phenomenon as its proponents like to claim, as opposed to being just a linguistic reification.
If the question as to the ontological status of the 'what it is like' is undecidable, as it seems to be, the question that seems to remain is as to what the importance of an answer one way or the other, if such were possible, would be to human life. Do you have an answer for that?
That is a very big claim. It obviously can't be proved, but what aspects of animal behaviour make you think that is plausible? I believe that analogical thinking is uniquely human, because no other species produces symbolic artefacts or behaves in ways indicating such abstraction. Am I wrong here? I'd be interested to know.
Our thinking about analogies tends to be strongly associated with language and I don't find it plausible that analogy in a linguistic sense plays much of a role in the behavior of non-human animals. However the 1a definition of "analogy from Merriam-Webster says:
1a: a comparison of two otherwise unlike things based on resemblance of a particular aspect
If we consider analogical thinking more broadly, such as in terms of noverbal pattern recognition, perhaps this youtube cat video provides behavioral evidence suggesting analogical thinking in cats?
Is there any meaning to asking 'what the "what it is like" really is'? Is it not like asking what a quantum field really is? Doesn't there necessarily come a stage of deconstruction where there is nowhere else to go ... epistemic bedrock? Just because we have a word/phrase labelling an aspect of life doesn't necessarily imply reification, although I agree it can often lead to that error. But of course it depends on your definition of 'thing', which is a vast and fascinating epistemological rabbit-hole in itself. A definition of (phenomenal) consciousness as 'what it is like to be a bio-agent', as distinct from a description of its structure and behaviour, seems useful to me.
One example of its usefulness is blindsight, where people's reactions indicate that they have sensed something yet they are not aware of doing so. (Cf https://aeon.co/essays/how-blindsight-answers-the-hard-problem-of-consciousness for Nicholas Humphrey's concise description and exploration of its implications.) In such a case, there is no what-it's-like-to-be-ness during the intramental-extramental interaction, despite its efficacy. The same could be said of artificial sensory-perceptual systems where similarly 'the light's on but no-one's home'. So it's a useful phrase which perhaps seems less prone to reification that consciousness, phenomenality, sentience, awareness, etc.
I am ontologically agnostic, so I will refrain from making any statement about what what-it's-like-to-be-ness 'really' is. I concur with your remark about its ontological status being undecidable ... because I think anything's(?) ontological status is undecidable.
Thanks for that. I wonder if the cat's would be as grateful! But does their reaction show analogical thinking ... or merely an inherent or learned reaction to a particular form? A domestic cat seems highly unlikely be comparing those objects with a snake, something beyond its experience. It is surely simpler to assume that certain long thin stimuli, be they cucumbers, socks or snakes, provoke a heuristic reaction. Indeed the cats' reaction speeds lend support to the latter explanation.
Analogical thinking requires the construction of correspondences between two different things/events. That's not just a reflex ... it's a much more developed and complex form of cognition. That is using one thing as symbolic of another thing: a line in the sand representing a path; a muddy patch of terrain (field) providing a representational basis for a mathematical space.
It is hard to understand why evolution would grant most animals such an ability. But that raises the question as to how humans got it. That's a big story.
Quoting Justin5679
Well you've just evoked the motivation for that part, ha!
Yes, this is more or less what I mean. We infer constructs in the physical science from those perceptual representations so that those constructs explain properties of those representations. Its more or less circular in that perceptual representations should only be reducible to things thay share the properties of those representations, things which have those properties because they have been directly inferred from them. The point is that trivially it shouldn't really make sense to reduce it into something which is not itself. It would he a weird world if that were possible or at least cogently defensible.
Quoting Christopher Burke
Yeah, I do make this point in a couple other posts on this thread. As some other posters have pointes out, it is difficult to make physicalism into something cohesive and coherent.
Nonetheless, I think what motivates people who intuitively think of themselves as or defend physicalism is I think the central role of the models we construct in the physical sciences and how other models, constructs, things fit around them. When I look around me in the world... physics. But turns out, making this into something useful or tangible is difficult. I have started to think that maybe physicalism, naturalism, other similar ideas perhaps are often adopted in opposition to, in reaction to ideas of dualism or that there needs to be a separate mental thing because there are things that we find difficult to explain. So maybe it is often adopted without a coherent ontology in mind but is like an anti-dualist stance. I dunno, thats just a thought.
Quoting Christopher Burke
Not saying that cats necessarily have analogies but I think these animals are much more complicated than people give tjem credit for and this dichotomy between human deliberation and reflexive animal instincts is not correct
The question is asked as to what a quantum field really is. Is it merely a model or is it ontologically real? And the thing with 'what it is like' is that we intuitively seem to think we know what that is, and yet when asked about it a coherent answer that distinguishes it from merely seeing. hearing, feeling, tasting and smelling cannot be given.
The quantum field is different in that we don't really have an intuitive sense of what it could be, so the question there is not whether our linguistically mediated interpretations of what is a kind of after the fact intuition are indicating something ontologically substantive does not apply in that case. So, I don't think the analogy holds.
Yes, that's a good point. Although I doubt that question (what a quantum field really is?) makes any sense. I was trying to say that there comes a point in any epistemic hierarchy where you can't reduce or describe any further. Quantum fields (currently) get to that baseline physically and what-it's-like-to-be gets to that phenomenally.
Quoting Janus
Isn't (phenomenal) consciousness what-it's-like-to-be sensing, perceiving, conceptualising, theorising, with attendant affect at each cognitive level? All we can do at the baseline of an epistemic hierarchy is point to an aspect of experienced or putative reality rather than deconstructionally represent it any further. The baseline concepts, referred to by their relevant symbols (the phrases 'quantum field' or 'what-it's-like-to-be') are perforce essentially indicative, not explicative. So your quest for an answer as to what what-it's-like-to-be 'really' is, seems destined to remain unanswered because we've run out of symbolic road.
BTW, I think we do need the extra concept of what-it's-like-to-be because cognition (sensing, perceiving, conceptualising, theorising) can occur without it, as in the case of AI (we assume) or blindsight (experimentally well attested).
I'm not sure modern physicists do spend much time asking what a quantum field 'really' is. Post-Popper, they seem content to regard it as representational: a space with appropriate vectors at each point which forms the most coherent current symbolic hypothesis conforming to observable data. Some may go empiricist and propose that as ontological, but in an age where physics has been exposed to quantum paradoxes and is increasingly cast as informational, I suspect they are few in number ... especially among theorists.
Ultimately don't all our normative theoretical constructs eventually boil down to our own 'raw' experience or reports by others based on their 'raw' experience? Perhaps our epistemic condition is rather like that of an exasperated parent, who after a long sequence of whys from their disputatious child, resorts to 'because I say so'. In the metaphysical case, we must end up with 'because I observe it'. I'm sure you are familiar with the Wittgenstein quote from his Tractatus: That of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence. Eventually there always comes a point of representational 'silence'.
I do sympathise with that sentiment and obviously human cognition has evolved from the same conditions as all other species which intramentally represent their world. But humans are just such an exceptional species that, if I were an alien scientist, I would immediately conclude that something special (in Earth terms) has happened here ... despite its humble origins. However I agree than we should never forget our roots as just part of nature ... now that Darwin has helped us climb down from our religious and Enlightenment pedestals.
Perhaps we can work on this. Perhaps a starting point could be asking: Is there a difference between, say, an electronic device with a sensor that can distinguish different frequencies of the visible spectrum, and is programmed to initiate different actions when detecting different frequencies; and me performing the same actions when I perceived the same frequencies? Or is my experience the same as the electronic device's?
I believe this is the same idea as what Douglas Hofstadter said in
[I]I Am a Strange Loop[/I]:
For me, that was just a guess. I'm not an expert in animal psychology. But I see videos on YouTube of animals that seem to make analogies in order to judge relationships. For example, a crow who imagines that a stick could be an extension of its beak to reach a morsel in a jar.
So, some experts think it's plausible, though perhaps un-provable, that some animals can reason by likeness. Of course animal reasoning is likely very primitive compared to human judgement. But the ancient assumption that rational thought (this relative to that) is "unique" to humans is passé. Scientists are beginning to seriously study animal thinking, but they are limited by the language barrier --- except possibly for parrots. :joke:
A new study has shown that monkeys are capable of making analogies. Recognizing relations between relations is what analogy is all about.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110923102213.htm
Zoosemiotics is the semiotic study of the use of signs among animals,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoosemiotics
Thanks for that. The baboon research is particularly interesting and I will have to abandon my proposition that analogical thinking is uniquely human. I'm pleased to 're-naturalise' analogical thinking by finding it in our close evolutionary relatives. Indeed the experiment may even indicate a more widespread capability of vision generally, although it is only likely to manifest itself in sophisticated animals who indulge ethological experimenters!
I also accept that widespread tool use, as extensions of their body parts for extra motor control, could be a another 'weak' form of analogical thinking. An ape using a stick to pick out ants from a hole might relate stick and finger. I hadn't thought of it that way before. It is also the case that animals use many signs which refer to something else, such as predator warning cries and mating signals. So I concede it makes sense to see all these as proto-analogical thinking that possibly provides a precursor of our own more sophisticated version. Useful.
Having rowed back on analogy as a human USP, what then defines our ability? I would posit the following as specifically human (but now without complete confidence!):
[1] Conceptual analogies, by which I mean the use of one concept as a model for another, is probably unique to humans. This is not just an association of a visual form or sound with something else, but a process requiring much more cognitive ability to establish correspondences. Examples would be a line representing a journey; a tree representing future decision options; a window as the representational basis for accessing information on a computer screen. This is employing the structure of a simple concept as the structural basis for a completely unrelated complex one. I have a theory that all abstract concepts rely on concrete ones as metaphors: the etymology of even our most complex concepts reveal their humble origins. My favourite is 'consider' from the Latin, con sideris, for 'with the stars'.
[2] The other distinguishing behaviour is the creation of symbols. These are not just signs (which merely indicate something else) or tools (which physically extend something else), but actually stand in for or replace something else. A speculative example would be how a stone used as a place-marker (a sign) for a sacred site gets taken away and used perhaps to represent that site. Such natural symbols were subsequently supplemented by constructed ones: symbolic artefacts: eg carving of gods, cave drawings, iconic and alphanumerical marks as symbols. Does any other species represent their thinking extramentally even in simple ways, let alone with language, graphics and mathematics?
A symbolic object (eg Apustimelogist's original example of the photograph) needs extra informational processing compared with a normal object. A symbolic object, natural or artefactual, is still an object and its information qua object can be represented conceptually by an observer as one would normally do with any object (ie the photo is paper with a photosensitive coating). But it also potentially contains (for the appropriate observer) information about something else, ie what it depicts (eg spouse on holiday). Hence a symbolic object needs two types of decoding: its intrinsic information as an object and the referent information it symbolises (by analogy). So I think the following statement could be misleading:
Quoting Apustimelogist
Symbolic artefacts remind us that objects/events need different representations depending on the purposes of the observer. Symbolic artefacts are themselves a metaphor useful for addressing the Hard Problem; ie how can some squidgy jelly produce hopes and dreams? Short answer: it doesn't! When we look at a person's brain you can represent it physically (and somewhat inadequately) as 'squidgy jelly', but that is only one of the necessary representations of that bit of reality. To do justice to that specially complex bit of reality, you need an extra representation involving its psychical functioning. Actually of course there are a plethora of different representations of the brain/mind, all trying to capture different information germane to different observers. Note that the visuo-tactile 'squidgy jelly' representation has no greater claim to fundamental veracity as any other.
So the ontological Hard Problem dissolves from trying (and of course failing) to find an extramental relationship between two different onticities (eg emergence, supervenience, panpsychic coexistence, etc) into finding correlations between different intramental representations of the same bit of reality ... a hard but tractable epistemological problem. Which indicates the most coherent categorisation of the human condition (I believe): we are what-it-is-like-to-be our representations. A bit of reality representing those bits of reality we encounter, including ourself.
Answering Apustimelogist's early question ("Why should a representation of a tree be reducible to brain components which have nothing to do with the tree and are physically separated from it?"): reducibility is not a propitious way to represent the informational process involved with modelling experience. Better to see it as correlating parallel representations: your perceptual image of the tree, your biophysical theory about the tree's functioning and your conceptual model of it stored as a neural configuration ... all referring to the extramental bit of reality you call 'a tree'. That's my representation of representation!
You could say that what defines a unique ability of homo sapiens is that "we know that we know, and we can communicate that knowledge in words". Although, as drag-on disputes on this forum indicate, the communication is imperfect. :smile:
Yes, that's a good point. Meta-representation ... an essential iteration for selfhood. And of course what philosophy is actually about: meta-theorisation, ie thinking about thinking. Similarly I define wisdom as the intelligent use of intelligence. So thank you for your wisdom. But doesn't your proposition "we know that we know" show that we also know that we know that we know. And doesn't my latter sentence show ... you can see where this is going.
And isn't the intramentality of homo sapiens just a life-long drag-on dispute? That ever-present problem, while conscious, of what to do next. Plus of course the life-long drag-on intersubjective negotiation the 'doing next' usually involves. We know what we know and we 'know' (sometimes) that others know. Hell may be other people ... but so is heaven? Even with imperfect communication.
Thanks again for dragging on the 'dispute' long enough to correct me re analogical cognition being more widely distributed than among humanity. Keep on dragging on!
I would prefer to say "what it is to be conscious" than 'what it is like to be conscious". It is definitely something to be conscious as opposed to not being conscious; to be an animal or human being as opposed to being a rock or even a tree. That is certainly how it seems to us.
Quoting Christopher Burke
I'd say rather that phenomenal consciousness is to be sensing, perceiving and reflective linguistically mediated consciousness is to be conceptualizing, theorizing, although I also think there is a prelinguistic mode of conceptualizing and theorizing.
The issue I see is the tendency to draw ontological conclusions based on our intuitive understanding of what it means to be conscious. I don't think there is any unequivocal way to talk about this. On the one hand we can say that conscious beings have a different kind of being than unconscious beings, and on the other hand we can say that they don't.
What do we mean by being? That's what it seems to come down to. And there are different usages, and no one usage can be shown to be privileged. I think what underlies peoples' obvious obsessions with these kinds of undecidable questions is the concern about death, about personal, or some other kind of, survival of death and the existence of "higher meaning".
Apart from those concerns I can't see what significance the question could have for human life. Does it not really boil down to what ontological standpoint seems more consistent with a belief in
a transcendent possibility or higher purpose to life?
Electronic devices don't care about anything, desire anything or want to avoid anything; animals and humans do. That seems to me to be the most salient difference and that is what I think it means to experience: to feel, to care, to want, to avoid and so on. I don't believe machines do any of that.
Do machines merely "juggle meaningless tokens"? The tokens they juggle have meaning to us. Do they mean anything to machines? Is it not so that things are meaningful to us only insofar as we care about them, feel something about them, whether it be pleasure, displeasure, desire or aversion?
The word "reducible" sounds problematic. Why do they have to "be reducible"?
Could they be viewed as "being caused by" ?
"If these experiences are representations of things in the outside world (OP), and are caused by "the brain activity that supports it" (OP) - Doesn't it sound more feasible? And it would be reasonable to expect such causal events.
Quoting Apustimelogist
They aren't, hence it can't.
Yes and I think we cannot know what that what-it-is-like bit really means as I believe you suggested somewhere earlier
Quoting Christopher Burke
Well I think this is more or less what reducing is when we believe that this correlating as cogently justified under some context. Now the question is whether there is some justification for reducing the tree to a brain. There is some sense in which it can be because there is a mapping between information in the outside world and your brain states which is physically mediated (i.e. by travelling light, surface reflectance properties, receptor stimulation and neural potentials). However, this isn't the same as the mapping when I construct a description of a tree. The physical mapping aforementioned is incidental since the tree itself is independent of my brain and the physical means information is carried to my brain. The question is, why when I am trying to desceibe a tree, the description I get is my brain. Given the independence suggested just now, there is no actual reasons. Trees are not brains and are totally separated. If my experiential states are representations of trees that map to components of trees, there is no reason why I should be able to examine my experiences and find that I can reduce it to brain activity, because my experiences are simply not about my brain if they are not representations of it.
When I am talking about reduction here, I am talking about an explanatory relationship. If experiences are purely representations or information about trees, then why should these representations carry information (that can be explained by) about brain states. Trees are the way they are totally independent of my brain. Trees have a shape that is nothing to do with my brain. If I then explicitly represent that shape information, that shape information should have no information about the inside of my brain in it.
The tree couldn't possibly walk into the brain, and start growing in the brain as another tree or copy of it just because the brain saw it, and it is seen to be the representation or information of the tree :rofl:
Quoting Apustimelogist
I agree with Corvus. I think 'reducing' should be confined to when one is accounting for a thing by referring to that thing's subparts. Eg an atom is reduced to subatomic particles, a sentence reduced to its words, a structure reduced to its components. Correlations on the other hand are correspondences between two different things. Eg smoking correlates with lung cancer. One correlate is not reducible to another: smoking is not reducible to cancer. Smoking is reducible to the sub-behaviours that comprise it: stick fag in mouth, light end, suck. And neither is cancer reducible to smoking because cancer reduces to pathologies in cells, biochemicals, etc. One may subsequently adduce a causal relationship between the two different things (smoking causes cancer), but causation isn't reduction either (even though it might require reductions to clarify it).
Likewise with your example. Your phenomenal image of a tree is not reducible to a some putative neuro-endocrinal arrangement which stores your image of the tree. It is perceptually reducible to sub-images of bits of the tree (ie of branches, leaves, fruit, etc). You could also conceptually reduce it by identifying its component botanical elements and processes; then further reduction into biochemicals; then into biophyical particles/fields/whatever elements you choose to put at the bottom of your epistemic reduction.
A neuroscientist might correlate your reporting of a tree image with a representation (scan) of your neuro-endocrinal arrangement. But there's no reduction here, merely correlation.
Quoting Apustimelogist
I can't see how your phenomenal image of a tree contains any information about its putative storage in your brain. Even a neuroscientist can't do that. What gives them the information about the neural correlate(s) of that perceptual image is their study of neurology, not any image of a tree, phenomenal or physical. Information about your correlated brain state can only be gleaned by observing that brain state in some way. Your phenomenal image is what-it-is-like-to-be the bit of reality that is also described physically as an embodied neurological nexus. Correlations between the two are therefore expected, but not reductions.
And that is why Physicalism's claim to be a complete is flawed. No physical concepts can be applicable to the phenomenal image. You can measure lengths, mass, density, age, etc of your tree, but you can't measure your phenomenal image of it.
Yes, maybe I was a bit careless there. The trouble here is that we are paddling around at the bottom of the epistemic well. There are no sub-concepts to fall back on, so we end up swapping synonyms. So 'sentient', 'aware', 'conscious', 'what it's like to be' are interchangeable, although some philosophers discern subtle differences. What I meant was 'what-it-is-like-to-be a complex enough bio-agent when normally awake or dreaming'. There's obviously potential circularity there. Define 'awake' or 'dreaming' and you get back to consciousness and what-it-is-like-to-be. But all these indicative symbols point to something we all 'know' without recourse to any symbolic representation of that state of being ... simply by being it.
Quoting Janus
I couldn't parse your sentence clearly, but you seem to propose 'phenomenal consciousness is to be' rather than 'phenomenal consciousness is what-it's-like-to-be'. However, since seemingly unconscious artificial recognition systems sense (ie detect) and perceive (ie identify a concrete particular), I don't think we can use just 'to be' to characterise consciousness. Personally, I do like the 'like' in what-it-is-like-to-be (what's not to like?) for that very reason. A current-level AI detection system is nothing it is like to be (we assume). But perhaps I should future-proof my earlier attempt at definition, so ... consciousness is 'what-it-is-like-to-be a complex enough system when normally awake or dreaming'. That's the end of my symbolic representational road.
Please don't ask how complex the system has to be!
How could we ever know?
I don't know, but I tend to think that out of all the raw sensory data that enters via the senses, only the tiny portion which is meaningful in some way, that is which is cared about, is attended to, and that that attention constitutes awareness or consciousness.
Quoting Christopher Burke
I agree with that. Experience I understand to be non-dual, while all our ways of talking about it are dualistic, which is inevitable given that we think in binaries: yes/ no, true/false, subject/object, on/off, good/evil. light/dark, pain/ pleasure etc., etc.
So, anything we say about it is going to be in some sense a distortion, a misrepresentation. And that's why, to get back to the OP, I say that the irreducibility of phenomenal experience does not refute physicalism any more or less than it refutes idealism. Both physicalism and idealism are under-determined, distortive characterizations of what is there for us.
Quoting Christopher Burke
There is no accounting for taste as the saying goes. Personally, I just prefer to say there is an essential feeling or affective aspect to consciousness which we share with animals and which I imagine machines lack; that seem more parsimonious and less potentially misleading to me.
I don't see the idea that there is an affective element to consciousness as distinguishing what it is like from merely sensing. I think sensing is always already affective and so I would not say that machines sense anything. Machines may have sensors that detect photons, sound waves, molecules and so on, but that is not what I would call sensing. I don't deny the term could be used other than the way I do, but if you want to use the term 'sensing' differently then we will just talk past one another.
I think it's fair enough to distinguish differences between human, animal and AI sensing, but they do share the common function of detecting the presence of something outside themselves. A sensory biological cell performs exactly the same function as an artificial sensor. It's what happens to the sense data immediately after the instant of interaction which differs.
Apart from the physical differences between biology and technology, affect is almost certainly the distinguishing criterion, because that is about motivation of and evaluation by the sensing individual in terms of their individual needs. It is hard to attribute any motivation and evaluation to simple organisms or current AI. But I suspect it must be necessary once brains developed and intramental modelling of the environment started.
Affect is attendant at all levels of cognition - sensation, perception, conceptualisation and theorisation. With the most abstruse philosophical issues, I might casually believe that I think and write about them to get as near to rational coherence as possible in my theory. But of course that purely rational explanation is not quite right. I actually think and write about philosophical issues because I desire that theoretical coherence. It feels more comfortable than cognitive dissonance ... for a philosopher anyway. (Generally, alas, people seem to have a very high tolerance of cognitive dissonance: cf politics and religion!)
This can be fascinatingly accounted for in informational terms. Coherence/order requires less energy to represent and process than incoherence/disorder. Those who know a bit of physics will recognise the entropy connection here and Newton's Second Law of Thermodynamics. Crudely the latter states that the universe tends to increasing disorder, ie greater entropy. Organisms (while alive) need to be highly ordered to survive so use lots of energy to counter the ever threatening entropy. To conserve energy, organisms try to reduce their informational processing needs. Representing orderly situations requires much less information (and therefore energy) than chaotic ones. Affect is the evaluative process here: we feel more comfortable being certain about our situation (ie having sufficient information about it) than being uncertain ((ie not having sufficient information about it). We are much more likely to have sufficient information in orderly (low entropy) situations than in chaotic (high entropy) which threaten our stability. We tend towards our comfort zones in which we feel safer, because it minimises energy usage. This is a very simplified version of Karl Friston's Free Energy Principle, which is much more complicated and comprehensive. (For a gentle introduction cf https://www.aliusresearch.org/bulletin02-fristoninterview.html.)
Incidentally this illustrates how efficacious an informational paradigm is, since it can straddle the psychical and physical.
Yes, this is what I have been talking about all along. But at the same time, a reduction is a special case of a correlation in the way you're talking about. You have two different representations, the original one and the reducex one and you are creating a mapping between them which is as you would describe a correlation.
Quoting Christopher Burke
I don't think any concepta can be to be honest, and in light of that, I don't think you can say the physicalists picture is more flawed in another. There is no alternative kind of more complete picture I think.
Indeed, all conceptual representations may be flawed ... but some are more flawed than others.
Physical concepts (from folk physics to quantum fields) are obviously hugely propitious. But that mode of representation is insufficient to represent all of life as experienced.
Consciousness needs another mode of representation, ie phenomenal concepts, to describe it: love, hope, fear, disappointment, uncertainty, attending to (a tree), etc. Some philosophies maintain that this is all there is: ie psychism. I agree with you that this is just as flawed as physicalism for parallel reasons: psychical concepts don't apply to tables, stars or atoms.
These two modes of representation can have convenient mappings between them, but to claim either can be reduced to the other is false. A reduction may be a sort of mapping, but not all mappings are reductions. I think we probably agree about all this.
But physicalism claims otherwise, sometimes using unconvincing fudge about 'emerge from' and 'supervenes upon' etc to address its rather large hole: the explanatory gap of consciousness. So, despite your posts, I cannot see how you maintain that this doesn't refute physicalism.
[1] Physicalism claims that physical representations can account for everything.
[2] We need non-physical psychical representations to account for some things.
[3] Ergo physicalism is a false claim.
Alternatively:
[1] Physical representation is based on observation.
[2] Consciousness/phenomenality/subjectivity/'what-it's-like-to-be-ness' cannot be observed.
[3] Ergo physicalism is a false claim.
Where is my error?
Well this is fair but I think it is also in some ways a straw man because most people who say they are physicalists will not have some kind of naive physicalism where they believe the only way to describe the world is with physical concepts. Of course we can talk about organisms, the weather, love, sport, green... whatever.
Maybe it refutes physicalism in thr way youre thinking about it but I think most physicalists would find that characterization of the issues extremely trivial. I could come to the point of [3] coherently by this type of thought process but then when I look around, what do I see? The world is full of physical things and everything seems to be grounded in the physical, even my consciousness with respect to brains.
I have actually said earlier in the thread that technically I shouldn't call myself a physicalist but i keep finding myself on this side of these debates which just reflects my intuitive leanings as opposed to a rigorous ontology.
A more rigorous view would note the difficulty in defining "physical" coherently but then I think this is going away from what motivates the physicalist perspective: that a functioning model of how the world works doesn't require dualism or some separable phenomenal machinery to it that is independent from our physical models. There is nothing else to explain about consciousness.
I would correct your first two premises as follows:
[1]Physicalism claims that physical [s]representations[/s] processes occuring in nature can account for everything.
[2]For practical purposes we need to resort to simplistic non-physical psychical representations to account for some things, because we don't have detailed data about what is going on in our brains, nor do we have brains capable of processing such a mountain of data in an expeditious way.
So you would at least need to add some additional premises to reach your conclusion.
Then surely they are not physicalists. They are people like us who think that physical representations are extremely effective with much of life, but not all of it. Physicalism plus is no longer physicalism by any definition I can think of. Once you concede that a purely physical stance is insufficient, how can you be a physicalist? I agree entirely that 'physical' needs a lot more work to define it, but whatever the definition is, it seems to me that there will be aspects of life which physical concepts don't account for. If you can actually provide a sufficient definition of the physical, then you have solved the Hard Problem.
I think the crux here is the implicit assumption that physical = real. I don't judge that there is any warrant for that ontological belief for several reasons:
- History shows the hubris of humans claiming to know what reality 'really' is. All sorts of ontologically dualistic systems positing earthly and transcendent realms were fervently believed contemporaneously to be reality. The success of science, and its worthy claim to monism, lulled us into the arrogance of Empiricism ... yet another claim to be able to circumvent perception and 'know the noumena'.
- Physical representations keep changing. 19th century physicists would have said the world is really made of atoms. Modern physicists would regard that as simplistic and have recourse to the much more epistemic concepts of fields and information. Has fundamental reality changed as we've changed our theories about it? A bit implausible.
- The neo-Kantian paradigm, ubiquitous in current neuroscience, psychology, ethology, etc, which assumes that our relationship to reality is essentially representational, is very well grounded in experiment.
All this is of course not to deny extramental reality per se, but merely to posit that each sufficiently complex organism interacts with it by intramentally constructing a model of it ... their own Weltenschuuang. We as bio-agents are no different. Reality, since we have good grounds for assuming it contains conscious agents, is more complex than solely physical concepts can handle. How many more centuries of Physicalist failure are we going to tolerate before accepting that there is something more complicated going on with reality?
Re your version of [1]: Can processes per se account for anything? I agree with Hume that causation is essentially epistemic. We can have a useful account (ie a symbolic representation) positing that A causes B. But causation is a not necessary concept. In a block universe where time is represented, A and B are part of a single spatio-temporal 'thread'.
Re your version of [2]:
'Practical purposes' do indicate something important about how we interact with extramental reality. I don't think they can be dismissed so easily as irrelevant to our understanding. You say "we need to resort to simplistic non-physical psychical representations", but most psychologists would dispute that pejorative classification as simplistic ... as would I.
Quoting wonderer1
Even if we had a complete model based on all possible data from observation, would we know what it is like to be that bit of reality?
The last dollop in the theory [of Physicalism] that it subjectively feels like something to be such [neural] circuitry may have to be stipulated as a fact about reality where explanation stops.
Steven Pinker, 2018, Enlightenment Now: the Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress
Because this is to say that your conceptualizations are the same as your ontology of the world. For instance, everyone believes in feelings which you might label "love", in everyday life peopke may not be able to or want to characterize that physically. But that doesnt mean you dont believe in a universe where there is something called love floating about with its onwn separate ontological being to physical things. Its still something that is embedded in the physical very much so. The fact I can make a conceptual separation is just trivial.
Quoting Christopher Burke
No I think its about needing something more than the physical to explain reality. Yes obviously we have things above physics like biology and aocial sciences bit they all seem to be grounded in the physical.
Quoting Christopher Burke
Again, its about needing something more than these models, regardless of what those models say specifically.
Quoting Christopher Burke
I don't really understand what extra things would be needed to explain conscious agents above things related to the natural sciences, math, computation, information theory etc.
I agree. There is much we can't be certain about regarding the nature of reality. Still, we are talking about the way a physicalist sees things.
Quoting Christopher Burke
It wasn't meant as a pejorative. Just a statement about what the situation is. Hopefully scientific psychologists would recognize, along with Einstein:
Psychologists are considering what is going on, in systems much more complex than Einstein considered. Simplistic psychological theories are the most we can reasonably hope for at this point in human history. I'm not saying that psychologists are not doing a great job at improving our understanding of our minds. It's just the nature of the situation humanity is in.
Quoting Christopher Burke
Not comprehensively. We aren't capable of fully knowing what it is like to be each other. But that's a limitation that comes with having a physical mind.
Quoting Christopher Burke
I think Pinker is overly pessimistic. There is much understanding to be gained beyond where Pinker suggests explanation might stop.
I agree. With humans, as soon as the sense data reaches awareness it is always already imbued with meaning. With machines it simply never reaches awareness unless it is ours or some other animal's.
Quoting Christopher Burke
Coherent theories can be wrong; most probably are. Or if not wrong then under-determined. For those who like thinking rationally consistency is important. I don't think those who think little experience cognitive dissonance, because consistency is not important to them, or they don't think enough to see that there are inconsistencies between their different thoughts or beliefs.
Quoting Christopher Burke
I think terms find their meanings, their senses, in relation to contexts, to associative networks of understanding. That's why any term will mean more or less differently to different people.
When we reach epistemic "bottom", so to speak, I think we confront our basic (rationally) groundless presuppositions. I don't see this as the place to find certainty, self-evidence, but rather the place that lets us see other possibilities. other basic presuppositions, other perspectives, and the basic groundlessness of all perspectives.
Of course, this won't satisfy those who are uncomfortable with uncertainty.
I'm afraid this "separate ontological being" makes no sense to me. If you do believe in such a realm, surely you are back to something like a Cartesian dualism, which then requires some formally inexplicable relation between the two different onticities ... such as 'embedding' in your proposal. Such a belief would violate Physicalism's claims of an exclusively physical monism. This is an indication of why I abstain from ontological declarations: I regard them as ultra vires.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Explanation is hypothesising about posited causal relations between observables. Consciousness is not observable. Can you weigh a thought? The extra ideas (things?) you requested are found in psychology, which tries to map between psychical concepts representing subjective experience and physical concepts representing neuroscientific observation (ie NCCs - neural correlates of consciousness). But that doesn't imply the former are physical or even that they are caused by or embedded in the physical. It merely implies that some complex bits of reality need parallel representations (mind/brain) to exhaustively describe them and deal with them practically.
Supposing a neuroscientist is looking at a brain scan which detects intensive neural behaviour in specific areas. S/he might be able, on the basis of previous identification of NCCs, to then say "Aha ...the 'owner' of the brain is probably feeling love", or another specific emotional state. This predictability has strong experimental support. But that doesn't mean that the emotional state is physical, merely that there is a mutual supervenience between two modes of representation, one psychical (non-observational) and the other physical (observational). You might say; "Ah ... but the physical observables are the real thing!" However if you did that, you would be denying your own subjective experience as real because it isn't observable (by any normative meaning of 'observable'), even by you.
For Physicalism to be up to the job of describing all of reality, it seems to me that it must do one of the following:
- Expand it's conceptual repertoire to include psychical concepts (btw this is what most versions of panpsychism try to do) ... but then it no longer falls under any normative definition of 'Physicalism'.
- Hope that mind can eventually be explanatorily reduced to (not just mapped onto) physical concepts ... but you and I don't believe that's possible; a long history of scientific 'failure' casts a severe doubt about the possibility; and I think it is logically incoherent.
If one of these get-outs works for someone, fine. But the cognitive dissonance is not to my taste.
I would prefer to say that it is not possible to know what-it-is-like-to-be a different bit of reality because we only know what-it-is-like-to-be the bit of reality which is ourself. However the ability to think about (intramentally represent) this with psychical concepts allows us to putatively attribute similar psychical concepts to other bits of reality: ie we can empathise and have a 'theory of mind'. Furthermore with detailed observations and imagination, talented authors can even write fictional accounts of other minds providing readers with alternative virtual vicarious subjectivities. I agree with the rest of your post.
I agree with that ... even coherent theories can be wrong, but only empirically based ones. Mathematical and logical theorems are, by definition, coherent and correct because they are a chain of valid deductions. If they are incoherent, they are not theorems. Unlike all empirically based theories, theorems are not defeasible and universally accepted once proven (by those who understand them).
The situation gets of course a lot messier with empirically based theories, but here again coherence is the only game in town. Now however, coherence means logical conformity with those existing theories regarded as true and consistency with relevant data - ultimate exterosensory data. This makes such theories more plausible of course, but as you say, doesn't guarantee truth. A vast ocean of epistemology opens up in trying to define truth, but for current purposes: a true theory is one with high levels of predictive and retrodictive success. This seems to bring in a necessary probabilistic aspect to theorisation.
So far, so robotic. It gets messier still when the various elements of a theory ('theory' defined in the widest possible way as an efficacious model of some bit of reality) become affectually 'weighted' by the theoriser (ie implicitly or explicitly assessed in terms of its costs and benefits to them). Rational cognition has to then achieve some construct which optimises the total affectual 'weight'. Hence the same facts can lead to different theories because of differing personal values. As you state:
Quoting Janus
Connotations count as much as denotations ... maybe even more in most ordinary situations.
By gaining coherence, we hope to also gain correspondence between our theory and its referent extramental states of affairs, but we can't check that directly. So coherence is our only yardstick for truth: to seriously doubt its reliability is the road to madness and damnation! A little fly in the ointment here is that at bottom, coherence relies on logic and any formal system suffers Gödelian incompleteness. But if anyone judges coherence to be unreliable, just try incoherence!
Quoting Christopher Burke
It seems to me that when it comes to simple empirical observations, the truth of statements is a matter of correspondence. 'it is raining' is true iff it is raining, 'that tree is taller than this tree' is true iff that tree is taller than this tree, 'my wife is having an affair' is true iff my wife is having an affair, and so on.
Of those examples the first two are perhaps much easier to check than the third; it obviously depends on how discreet my wife is. Basic science consists in just such ordinary empirical observations, and observations augmented by equipment such as the telescope and microscope.
When it comes to the explanatory phase, though, the theories that serve as explanations cannot be verified to be true, and even falsification has its issues, so I think we do assess the plausibility of such explanations according to how well they cohere with the whole body of such theoretical explanation.
I'm not sure about the applicability of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem to anything beyond Peano arithmetic, but in saying that I'm only parroting what I remember reading; I haven't looked into it much.
If correspondence is thought as applying to the world as it in itself, an absolute context-independent reality, and not merely to the world as it is experienced and understood by humans, a contingent, relational, contextual reality, then of course it is out of its depth.
I agree about the agreement. I hope that doesn't happen too often. There's no fun in that! But thankfully you've raised several interesting points.
Quoting Janus
I know what you mean here. One can imagine that sensorium level representations (empirical ones) are 'sort of' veridical. Vision is almost ubiquitously used as the exemplar of this. It is highly implausible to assume that our extero-sensations and the percepts formed from them do not correspond with our environment, otherwise our ancestors and ourselves wouldn't have survived. But one still cannot check that directly of course. My view is that raw sensation is a priori biological, but thereafter (ie percepts to some extent, concepts, theories) our representations are shaped by a posteriori personal and cultural factors. Going up the cognitive hierarchy doesn't preclude a putative correspondence with extramental states of affairs, but does make that correspondence more fragile, ie defeasible.
Using vision as an exemplar unfortunately makes empiricism (ie thinking the world is as we see it) more seductive. We are less beguiled with other senses. It is easier to accept that, for instance, sweetness is our reaction to something rather than being a quality of the sugar cube per se. Yet surely the same caveat should be applied to vision. A bit of reality we represent by the symbol 'grass' is not itself green. It just corresponds to our light wavelength measurements of 495-570 nm, itself of course another way of representing the same bit of reality. Visuospatial distribution (points, edges, regions) seems easiest to claim as veridical, but only because it is supported by tactile and auditory representations. Our claim that sensations correspond to extramental reality is only ultimately justified by other sensations (including those derived from scientific instruments).
Quoting Janus
Standard truth statements like you give ('p' is true iff p) always make me slightly uneasy.
- 'p' is a representation (a linguistic statement) supposedly justified by p (its extramental representatum). But how do you know p? Well of course it's by having a another representation of p. For instance, the sentence 'there is a tree' is justified by simultaneously having a percept of a tree. All you have is parallel representations, one linguistic and the other iconic. Truth statements like those seem to me to pretend to have direct access to extramental reality per se as their justification.
- Mischievously: Is '('p' is true iff p)' only true iff ('p' is true iff p)? Representation is always a 'hall of mirrors'!
I do hope you disagree with me.
Thankfully I think I do disagree with you on some points, or at least feel the need to point out that we seem to be talking about different things or about things from different angles.
Quoting Christopher Burke
I agree with you in thinking that our perceptions are most plausibly thought to be telling us something about the extra-human environment, or at least about the interactions between us and the environment, and this is borne out by the obvious everyday fact that we humans see the same things in the environment, right down to very precise and specific features of the things we find in the environment.
And I am saying we can check if it is raining, or if the cow over there is mooing, or if the creek has dried up due to lack of rain, or if my house was burned down in a bushfire, and so on and so on. This is just a claim about the collective representation we call "the empirical world", and not a claim about what it is that might give rise to that collective representation. Within the empirical world correspondence between statements and actualities rules.
Quoting Christopher Burke
Sweetness is what we experience when we interact with certain substances. Whether we are to say the sweetness is in the substance, in the interaction between tongue and substance or in the tongue, or more radically, in the mind, I think comes down to preferences for one or another of several different imaginable ways of thinking about the experience.
If I say "this apple is very sweet" and I offer it to others to try, I can expect a fair degree of agreement from the others. There may be the odd person whose plate does not register sweetness, but reliable general agreement can be expected.
Quoting Christopher Burke
Note I am claiming only that correspondence is checkable within the collective representation, the empirical world. So, I am not saying there is anything more that we can be completely certain of regarding the assertion "there is a tree" than that we all see a tree there. We don't really know what it is that gives rise to us all seeing a tree there, other than there is "something going on" that reliably produces the perception of a tree there. Even the cat sees it; we see her climbing it, trying to catch the birds that apparently also see it and perch in it.
Perhaps the most parsimonious conclusion is that there is actually a tree there, but we can't be sure; the tree might be a projection of a universal mind. But then if it were a projection of a universal mind and not a mind-independent concrete existent, would it not still be the case that there is a tree there that is independent of my mind and of any and all other minds apart from the universal one?
It seems to me these are the only imaginable possibilities: concrete mind-independent existent, or projection of a universal mind. can you think of any others? In any case, it seems this is an unanswerable question; people may have their preferences: idealism or materialism, but there seems to be no possibility of a definitive answer. This is where correspondence fails. Problem is coherence seems to be a matter of taste.
Yes, I don't believe in that. There was a typo. Should have been : "But that doesn't mean you believe..."
How else can you conceptualize your thoughts though without some form of dualism. We live in a universe explained by physical models that explain models of our brain which functionally explain in principle our entire mental lives. Even if you're agnostic about ontology or hard find it an inherently noncoherent concept like I would, these things are hard to ignore. Its very powerful. Its much more than a parallel relationship I think; they aren't really even because the mind just isn't anywhere independent of the brain in any meaningful way.
Well it really depends what you mean but my purpose really isn't to kind of re-engineer all our concepts into physical one. But again, even if it is not a physical concept, those feelings we have are inherently to do with our brains.
I don't think its about making a choice between different things being real, its about the explanatory options open to us, and where they lead, which generally goes toward the brain and computational theories etc.
Again, I think this is just implying a naive kind of physicalism which i dont believe people endorse generally. Its like saying that a physicalist shouldnt take a field like psychology seriously or accept its concepts. Its like saying that anyone who accepts psychology can't be a physicalist. This is obviosly not true. Again, just because we have experiential and psychological concepts, doesn't mean we don't want to in principle exain them at some level thriugh physicla models without requiring any other kind of dualistic notions. Thats all I'm really saying ... I think.
I just disagree with the idea that, in order to be a physicalist, you have to believe that everything needs to be reduced and explained in some precise, neat, final way. I think we are limited observers and there can be in principle good physical or informational or computational explanations for the limits of what we can and cannot explain. We may not be able to explain everything, we may not be able to have finalize coherent fundamental ontologies about the universe. But I think within what we can explain there is just this centrality by which everything seems to revolve around and which we describe as the physical. I look around the rooma nd see physical things, I think about where my experiences and thoughts come from and think in terms of the brain. etc etc. we have come a hell of a long way in learning how brains and minds work.