On the substance dualism
Here, I provide a short argument for substance dualism based on the fact that experience exists and is coherent.
P1) Experience, the subject, is a conscious event that is informative and coherent
C1) So, there must be a substance, the object, that contains the information and is coherent#1
P2) The object cannot directly perceive its content, the information#2
C2) So, there must be another substance, the mind, that perceives the object and apprehends the subject
C) Therefore, we are dealing with the substance dualism (From C1 and C2)
#1 C1 follows since the experience does not have the capacity to be coherent on its own, given its definition. Therefore, we need a substance that contains the information and is also coherent.
#2 The object can indirectly perceive its content, and that requires another substance to perceive the information and change accordingly, such that the object can then perceive the content of another substance. The content of another substance must be the same as the content of the object, though. This requires two conscious substances and is complex, so we prefer the simpler model; please see C2.
I just noticed that the subject is a term used for experiencer whereas in the above argument, I used it as a synonym for experience. To avoid this confusion I change the above argument slightly in the following form:
P1) Experience is a conscious event that is informative and coherent
C1) So, there must be a substance, the object, that contains the information and is coherent#1
P2) The object cannot directly perceive its content, the information#2
C2) So, there must be another substance, the mind, that perceives the object and apprehends the experience
C) Therefore, we are dealing with the substance dualism (From C1 and C2)
#1 C1 follows since the experience does not have the capacity to be coherent on its own, given its definition. Therefore, we need a substance that contains the information and is also coherent.
#2 The object can indirectly perceive its content, and that requires another substance to perceive the information and change accordingly, such that the object can then perceive the content of another substance. The content of another substance must be the same as the content of the object, though. This requires two conscious substances and is complex, so we prefer the simpler model; please see C2.
P1) Experience, the subject, is a conscious event that is informative and coherent
C1) So, there must be a substance, the object, that contains the information and is coherent#1
P2) The object cannot directly perceive its content, the information#2
C2) So, there must be another substance, the mind, that perceives the object and apprehends the subject
C) Therefore, we are dealing with the substance dualism (From C1 and C2)
#1 C1 follows since the experience does not have the capacity to be coherent on its own, given its definition. Therefore, we need a substance that contains the information and is also coherent.
#2 The object can indirectly perceive its content, and that requires another substance to perceive the information and change accordingly, such that the object can then perceive the content of another substance. The content of another substance must be the same as the content of the object, though. This requires two conscious substances and is complex, so we prefer the simpler model; please see C2.
I just noticed that the subject is a term used for experiencer whereas in the above argument, I used it as a synonym for experience. To avoid this confusion I change the above argument slightly in the following form:
P1) Experience is a conscious event that is informative and coherent
C1) So, there must be a substance, the object, that contains the information and is coherent#1
P2) The object cannot directly perceive its content, the information#2
C2) So, there must be another substance, the mind, that perceives the object and apprehends the experience
C) Therefore, we are dealing with the substance dualism (From C1 and C2)
#1 C1 follows since the experience does not have the capacity to be coherent on its own, given its definition. Therefore, we need a substance that contains the information and is also coherent.
#2 The object can indirectly perceive its content, and that requires another substance to perceive the information and change accordingly, such that the object can then perceive the content of another substance. The content of another substance must be the same as the content of the object, though. This requires two conscious substances and is complex, so we prefer the simpler model; please see C2.
Comments (195)
C1 and C2 follow from P1 and P2 respectively, each is a form of Modus Ponens.
Not usually but it can do. e.g. "Water is wet and wobbly. Therefore water is wet." Not very interesting admittedly, but it is an inference.
Assertions without argument are just as easily dismissed without argument. Try again.
It's an example of the &-elimination rule, a valid inference in the simple sentential logic I did ages ago.
I don't think it's a tautology, it's not saying exactly the same thing twice. Even if it were it could still be an inference. You can conclude that "Jim is bald" from "Jim is bald". Only a dick philosopher would actually say that of course.
But I agree it's uninformative.
You seem to be misunderstanding what Modus Pones is, and how it works.
MP is in the form of,
P -> C
P
C
You must demonstrate and prove why P is the case, before concluding C. You cannot just say something as P, and just because you said P, C follows from P. There is no relevance or any logical consequences or entailment between P and C in your statements. In that case, you cannot come to conclusion C from P.
Which premises, P1 or P2, do you have a problem with?
Which one would you like to discuss first? And I didn't say that you have a problem!
Quoting MoK
You did.
What are the relevance between P1) and C1)? How does C1) derive from P1)?
Quoting MoK
This conclusion doesn't have logical consequence from P1), and sounds ambiguous in its claim.
I said: "Which premises, P1 or P2, do you have a problem with?". I was referring to the premises rather than you.
Quoting Corvus
First, we have to agree on two things: 1) Our experiences are coherent, and 2) This coherence cannot be due to the experience itself since the experience is merely a conscious event. If we accept these two, then we realize that there must be a substance that the experience is due to hence C1 naturally follows from P1.
You should have said "Which premises are problematic?" rather than "P1 or P2, do you have a problem with?" Your sentence was then not communicating your original intention or idea.
Quoting MoK
Our experience is not always coherent. Some are, and some are not. So, it is already unclear from the start.
The coherence must be from our reasoning.
Quoting MoK
What is the substance in your experience? We don't see or know anything about a substance in our experience. We know about the content of experience, not a substance.
Our experiences, excluding our thoughts, are always coherent. Just look around and give me an example of a single experience that is not coherent. Reality is coherent hence our experiences too.
I am not interested in reasoning here. The reasoning could be right or wrong. What I am interested in is reality as we experience it.
Quoting Corvus
I don't have direct access to the substance, the object here. I am arguing in favor of it. I have direct access to my experiences only.
In that case, it is nothing to do with coherence. You cannot claim coherence from experience when you are not interested in right or wrong. Something is coherent if it makes sense. Making sense is possible when something is reasonable.
Quoting MoK
What is the substance? Would it be objects in your experience? Why use the word substance? The word substance is not clear in the context.
Might be an existential generalisation: Experience is "informative and coherent" therefore something is "informative and coherent"
Experience is coherent, therefore something is coherent.
Quoting MoK
...is pretty obtuse. However, a thermostat "perceives" the temperature, it's content. If the information is not "perceived" by the thermostat then it could not turn on the heater. And here's the rub; if substance dualism is correct, and there are two different substances, then the problem becomes how they interact. If mind is a seperate substance to body, how is it that a body can be perceived by a mind, and how is it that a mind can change a body?
Quoting MoK
Then there is no more to be said.
Quoting bert1In logic a tautology is a statement that is true by it's logical form, such as (A&B)?B.
Oh fair enough. I'm wondering if I was taught slightly different stuff from others.
But yes, B does follow from A & B, as you said. Hence my reading of P1 as an existential generalisation, another inference from a single line. From f(a) we can infer ?(x)f(x).
But I'd understand to be referring to the rest of the supposed argument, which is problematic.
I think I can see what you're trying to prove here, but it's very garbled. The first three terms, 'experience, subject, conscious event' are all very philosophically thick terms that by themselves have been subject to volumes of literature. Conjoining them in such a dense sentence doesn't do justice to their meaning.
So, is 'the subject' an 'event'? I would think not, because 'events' exist in time, they have a discrete beginning and end. Subjects of experience are different from events on those grounds in that they are persistent through time and even through changes of state. Experiences are undergone by the subject, and they are coherent insofar as the subject is able to integrate them with their previous experiences, so that we know how to interpret the experience.
Notice that 'Substance' in philosophy has a completely different meaning than it does in regular discourse. Generally 'substance' is a 'material with uniform properties' (e.g. a liquid substance, a metal substance etc). In philosophy, the word has a different meaning. It was introduced as the Latin 'substantia' in translation for the Greek 'ousia', which is nearer in meaning to 'being' or 'subject'.
In many discussions of 'substance' in philosophy, this distinction is lost, leading to the question of what kind of 'substance' the mind might be, which is an absurd question. It is the fatal flaw in Cartesian dualism, one which Descartes himself could never answer. The mind is not a 'thinking thing' in any sense other than the metaphorical. Reducing it to a 'thinking substance' is an absurdity. (This is why Aristotle's matter-form dualism retains a plausibility that Cartesian dualism never exhibited.)
As for the translation of 'ousia', see Joe Sachs' IEP entry on Aristotelian Metaphysics.
Quoting Aristotle's Metaphysics, IEP
Quoting Banno
Notice the scare quotes. Obviously the reaction of a thermostat to the environment is just that - an energetic reaction which can be described entirely in physical terms. But is absent the semiotic or interpretive dimension that characterises the most rudimentary forms of organic life. In other words, it is never intentional.
They were certainly intended. Few words are as loaded, especially in these fora, as "perceive". You again make the mistake of assuming there is a ghost in the machine, and then pretending you have demonstrated it.
The basic problem for substance dualism remains - explaining how the ghost interacts with the machine.
Obviously you wrote that before you read my remarks above my response to you, which explicitly describes the flaw with the idea of the 'ghost in the machine'. Have another go.
Which is why I took the trouble of explaining it (not that I expect the explanation to be understood by the poster to whom it was addressed, but you might get it.)
Quoting Wayfarer
This does not rule out that the reaction of a mind to the environment is just that - an energetic reaction which can be described entirely in physical terms. A reaction that might also and equivalently be described in terms of intent. Hence my response, that the supposed dualism remains undemonstrated.
But that's the whole point of 'intentionality'. Minds of all kinds - organisms of all kinds - display attributes which are *not* reducible to physical terms, as they are semiotic in nature (which I learned from Apokrisis.) To say that they are 'describable in physical terms' means that they can be accounted for solely in terms of physical laws - which is physicalism.
And what about the reaction of a thermostat, or of iron to oxygen, requires an explanation in terms of 'intentionality'? So, now you're not a physicalist, but a panpsychist! Make up your mind-substance.
Unplug the thermostat from the heater, and drop the temperature - the thermostat tries to turn the heater on, but can't... (a description in terms of intent, not physics)
That "Minds of all kinds display attributes which are *not* reducible to physical terms" is exactly the issue in contention.
The two descriptions - physical ind intentional - are not mutually exclusive. That your body is flooded with oxytocin does not mean you are not in love. I'll bold that for emphasis - both can be true at the very same time, and indeed probably are.
It's not required. Btu it can still be true.
'Tries' here is clearly metaphorical. What actually happens is, nothing. The events do not trigger the response. Nothing has 'tried' to do anything.
Rubbish. It's sending the signal, but there is no heater connected that can respond. It is trying, but can't.
That description is quite clear, quite diagnostic of the problem, and not a metaphor.
You're anthropomorphising, projecting human emtions on to a device. A signal is not being sent, due to the conditions for its transmission not being present. Nobody is trying to do anything, unless a technician is trying to repair it.
Yep. Further, that's what you do when you say someone overdosed on oxytocin is in love. :kiss:
In other words, the subject consciousness' substance content is qualia, which the object subconscious substance doesn't have, but if the brain's internal language is qualia, then when the qualia is broadcast at large, the brain indirectly learns about the information the object contains.
I agree. Consciousness does not fit into what Aristotle called Ousia. In fact in his writings on time Aristotle stated that beings (Ousia) are not in time and exclude it. Another approach is needed that considers the temporality of consciousness as something that constitutes it. If the being of consciousness is closely related to temporality it is difficult to understand why we are still speaking in Aristotelian language.
So of what substance is the qual - is it mind, or is it object? Or is it something else, a third substance, in which case we presumably need a forth and fish substance to explain how qualia interact with ghosts and with machines...
Quoting MoK
It doesn'tstiumulus happens at the extroceptors (external senesory organs). And moves internally...through physical substances. Perceptions ARE physical realities. There are irreducibly many mental ways of organizing physical perceptions though, which give perceptions a mentalistic air about them.
You always have something solid to say, even when I'm like wtf... no... a moment of ruminating and I'm like, wait wtf... yes... you ever teach before? If you don't mind, @ me in the shout box with some book recommendations?
The term nearest to 'consciousness' in the Greek lexicon (incidentally I'm not schooled in Greek, but this passes as general knowledge) is 'psuche', which is usually translated as 'soul', and which has come down to us as 'psyche'. And that fits perfectly well into the Aristotelian corpus. There are two principle sources, D'Anima ('On the Soul') and one of the books of the Metaphysics. But the cardinal difference between the Aristotelian and Cartesian philosophy, is that Descartes' depiction of 'res cogitans' as 'thinking thing' ('res' means 'thing'.) There's nothing like that in Aristotle. Rather in Aristotle the rational intellect ('nous') is what is capable of perceiving essentials and universals. That capability is fundamental to Aristotle's hylomorphism (matter-form dualism), which is very different to Descartes' matter-mind duality, because it depicts intellect (nous) more in terms of a capacity than as some ethereal 'thinking substance'. //very roughly, the correspondence between intellect and body, is analogous to that between form and matter. Which is why the soul (psuche) is called 'the form of the body.' Here, 'form' does not mean 'shape' but 'organising principle'.// That's why hylomorphism is still a live option in current philosophy. See Contemporary Hylomorphism (.pdf file) for a long bibiography.
I brought this up, because the Cartesian 'thinking thing' is still very much written into the way we think about mind-body relations, often without us being aware of it. It provides the 'grammar', so to speak, of the way it is thought about. That is the origin of the 'ghost in the machine' allegory (@Banno)
I mean, Nietzsche dispels that quite well enough with BGE 17. Furtherstill in Ecce Homo when detailing how he wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra. "When" is to say, akin to one meditating and not identifying wtf they're hearing, but rather just hears it without consciousness without analysis... it becomes a sort of white noise, a sort of music and melody. That is when your inner thoughts really come to you, without thinking... one merely becomes the mouth piece of internal unconscious forces.
This reminds me of Kant's critique of the Cartesian cogito. Kant said that we cannot perceive ourselves except as phenomena and not as things in themselves. Not to mention that in Kant there is no treatment of the mind but a treatment of faculties. In that sense Kant is Aristotelian following what you are saying.
Is all this question about subtances a pre-Kantian discussion?
Quite. Kant did, after all, adopt Aristotle's Table of Categories practically unchanged. But the main point I am trying to draw out, is the nature of this 'substance' in 'substance dualism'. It's important in relation to philosophy of mind, generally.
Not professionally.
Suggest a topic.
There's no ghost.
We wonder what qualia are good for, since consciousness comes too late in the process for it to be causal (of the result already formed by the subconscious brain analysis object 500 milliseconds previous); so, aside from life's great benefit-feeling of experiencing, perhaps qualia get utilized as a kind of short-cut brain-language clear summary for the brain at large to use as input, or at least for memory to store and objects to know as input for further analysis, since qualia combine everything into unity,
Quoting Banno
It's physical information in a different form than the same information in the object's form.
They are not good for much at all. If they are internal sensations unavailable to others, then they are private in the sense dismissed by Wittgenstein, and unavailable for our public discourse. If they are available to others, then they are no different to the sensations we call "red" and "rough' and so on, and we may as well simply use those.
At best the idea might be operationalised as a correlation between a sensory input and a neural pattern. But that would be to use the notion of qualia in a very different way to the philosopher who sees it as the epitome of conscious experience. If qualia are mere neural patterns, then they cannot take on the task of showing that there is something special about mind that is not found in physics.
I think this is a mistake. The idea that consciousness is not causal. It seems to me that it would be a very strange for the world to be full of people writing about consciousness, writing about qualia and the ineffable experience of consciousness, if consciousness were not casual.
It may not be the immediate cause of any action, but it doesn't need to be immediate to be causal.
As I said, the reason can be right or wrong, so it is not a good example for our discussion. The rest of our experiences are, however, coherent. For example, the cup of tea on my table has a specific location, shape, and color. These properties are not subject to change unless I intervene and change the location of the cup, for example. The cup does not move on its own, it does not disappear, etc. When I move the cup, the motion is as I intended. To summarise, our experiences are coherent, excluding thoughts that are sometimes coherent and sometimes not.
Quoting Corvus
A substance is something that exists and has a set of properties.
Quoting Corvus
I perceive the object by this I mean I get access to its content, the information that it carries. The object is not in my experience.
Quoting Corvus
Because it is needed for the sake of discussion.
Quoting Corvus
I hope it is clear by now.
Reason is not just for right or wrong. It is the general faculty for all knowledge.
Quoting MoK
How do you know they are coherent? What is the ground for your experience being coherent?
Quoting MoK
Is Mok a substance? He exists and has a set of properties.
Quoting MoK
Where is the objects then? What does the object denote in actuality?
Quoting MoK
Substance is an abstract concept which has no reference, hence it sounds vague and ambiguous. Not a good word to use for the discussion.
Quoting MoK
Not quite.
I am not a logician but from what I read on Wiki P1 and C1 are not an example of existential generalization since the subject and object are two different things. Here, I want to argue the existence of a substance that carries the information and is coherent from the fact that experience is informative and coherent.
Quoting Banno
By perceiving here I mean the object gets access to the content it carries, the information, in the form of experience. The thermostat in this sense does not perceive anything since its perception is not a form of experience.
Quoting Banno
In this thread, I am interested in answering the first question. I will open another thread in the future to answer the second question. We have three substances here, namely the brain which is a physical substance, the object, and the mind. The brain to the best of our understanding is a set of connected neurons. The function of the brain can be understood from the behavior of neurons though. The mind, however, does not have direct access to the brain or neurons by this I mean that the mind does not directly perceive the brain or neurons. Therefore, there is a substance, the object, which intervenes between the brain and the mind. The object is the substance and it changes depending on the neural processes in the brain and is the substance that the mind directly perceives. The object has a set of properties so-called Qualia simply the texture of our experiences. I have to say, that in this thread I was initially interested in discussing the mind and object only. This means that we are dealing with two substances hence the substance dualism. When it comes to a person, we however need three substances at least. So I have to discuss the brain as an extra substance since you asked for the interaction between the body and the mind.
Quoting Banno
I meant that thoughts/reasons are not a good example of our experiences since they could be right or wrong, coherent or incoherent. Here, I am mostly interested in those examples of our experiences that are coherent, our experiences of reality for example.
Thank you very much for your interest and understanding. I am glad that you understand what I am trying to argue here.
Quoting Wayfarer
I studied the philosophy of mind to a good extent. I know the literature is very extensive on each of these terms.
Quoting Wayfarer
I am aware of that. I normally try to provide a condensed OP as a base for the discussion and elaborate later when it is necessary.
Quoting Wayfarer
By event, I mean something that happens or takes place. The event could have duration depending on the subject of focus of the conscious mind. Perhaps there is a better term for what I am trying to say.
Quoting Wayfarer
What do you mean by the subject here? Person? If yes, I agree with what you said. I however use subject as a synonym as experience. Please reread my argument given my definition of the subject and tell me what you think.
Quoting Wayfarer
By substance, I mean something that exists and has a set of properties or abilities.
Quoting Wayfarer
The mind is a substance with the ability to experience and cause another substance, the object. The object is a substance with a set of properties, so-called Qualia.
I think we have three substances when it comes to a person, namely the brain, the object, and the mind. The object has a set of properties so-called Qualia. The mind directly perceives the object and gets informed about the content of the object. The object is subject to change depending on neuronal processes in the brain.
Up to here, I introduce two substances, namely the mind, and object. The mind is a substance with the ability to experience and cause the object whereas the object is a substance with a set of properties so-called Qualia.
Quoting DifferentiatingEgg
Without the mind, we cannot possibly perceive anything.
I already elaborated on the coherence in reality when I discussed my cup of tea here.
Quoting Corvus
My body is a substance, it is a physical substance. There are two other substances that are discussed in the OP, namely the mind and the object. The mind is a substance with the ability to perceive and cause the object. The object is another substance with a set of properties so-called Qualia.
Quoting Corvus
The object is a substance that is perceived by the mind. Please see the last comment.
So then the mind is physical?
No, the physical substance is another category, such as my body, a cup of tea, etc. so to summarize we have at least three substances, the mind, the object, and the physical.
I question the interpretation Libet's study. It seems odd to say that the task, flexing the wrist, was well-defined; they talked about moving the wrist; and the subjects sat thinking about moving the wrist. Consciously thinking and talking about it, and consciously debating when to do it. But when it happened, it wasn't a conscious decision? Seems very suspicious.
I'd be more convinced if the brain made a decision with no involvement from consciousness. Like if they're all watching for the wrist to move, but the ankle moves instead. Or the hand picked up a pencil and started writing.
I personally don't care if that particular movement was conscious or not. I've come to view conscious decisions as something separated in time from when they're actually realized. I believe the majority of actions are subconscious, and the conscious part of us is almost like a feedback system for our subconscious decision mechanisms.
So imo it's pluasible that your conscious mind has almost no direct control of what your body does, but it can command your subconscious to do it. Most of the stuff your body does doesn't get mediated by the conscious part at all, it's mostly subconscious, but your conscious mind can choose to send immediate commands (which have to be mediated first by the subconscious, and then go to your muscles), or - and this is even more important - can tell your subconscious when it did something wrong, and should do something different the next time a similar scenario arises.
I actually think the point of consciousness is mostly that last thing, somehow signaling to your subconscious to do something different, because your conscious analysis determined it wasn't optimal.
A substance is something that exists and has a set of properties or abilities. The physical substance has a shape, location, etc. as its properties. The object has the properties of the so-called Qualia. The mind has the ability to perceive and cause the object.
It does not make sense to say, your seeing a cup with a set of properties in a location is the ground for the experience being coherent. You are bound to have plenty of other experiences that are incoherent such as what other people feel, believe and think in their minds, and how they will act, decide or behave in the future etc etc. You won't quite be sure why you dreamt what you dreamt in your sleep, and you won't know what you will see in your dreams in the future etc etc.
Another problem is just saying, your seeing a cup in front of you, cannot be the object ground for your experience being coherent, because no one knows what you are seeing or perceiving in your mind just by listening to your statement or claim on what you were seeing.
There is also possibility that what you were seeing was an illusion, not real perception too.
Quoting MoK
It would be far more clear to say, body, mind or object than substance, because substance can mean many other things, and it doesn't not directly denote or refer to any particular objects. It is an obscure word which has wide scope on its meaning from ancient times.
"I feel happy." (subject verb object)
'I' (as the conscious awareness subject of consciousness,) 'feel' (experiences) 'happy' (the qualia object content of consciousness result produced just previous by the subconscious neural analysis).
So, awareness experiences the qualia-form information given from the neural-form information. note that the information has two forms.
What is the nature of consciousness?
It intrinsic (here and now, no extrinsic factors), compositional (various sources of distinctions), informational (causeeffect), integrated (irreducible), whole, and exclusive (nothing extra).
Further, it has being, but has no direct doing, although it may be used as a future reference for indirect doing, which wholly leaves intelligence for the doing.
It makes no reference to the neural brain states that gave rise to it.
It has mental unity, which is a unified field, as called the grain argument, meaning that while the brain objectively appears like grains of sand, consciousness is subjectively experienced like the whole beach. It's kind of like linear-sequential vs. parallel-holistic, or as brain matter is divisible into parts and extended, while consciousness is unified into one central experience.
So, qualia unify and centralize the brain matter parts; this seems useful for something.
My question also. Quoting MoK
Subject of experience. Not simply human subjects, but sentient beings, generally.
P1 is not about subject and object. It predicates coherence to experience.
There's no helping some folk. I'll leave you to it. Cheers.
I think you refer to experience as a tabula rasa. But haven't you read Kant? the subject structures that which provides us with the senses. In that sense "coherence" is not given by the object, but in the interaction between the subject and the object. The subject is also active in the shaping of experience.
On what basis do you say that experience cannot be "coherent"? That requires a demonstration. For it makes much more sense to see experience as composed of forms of sensibility (space and time) and categories of the understanding. Otherwise experience would be chaos of stimuli.
Quoting MoK
The so-called qualia for example are the ways in which the subject interprets the stimuli given by the relationship with the object. We cannot say that objects have qualia, but that qualia are active interpretations of the subject.
From a few years ago:
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Two very different ways of talking about the very same thing.
Do we need to reduce one to the other?
There is indeed a discussion to be had about how the selection of paint leads to the impact that Guernica has on the viewer. In the end you might be able to show the effect, but not to say it; there is nothing to say, when what is left is to look a the painting. A complete description of the tones and materials will not have the same impact.
_________________
None of which rules out the fact that the painting Guernica and the Taj Mahal are physical objects. It's the "just that" that is problematic. Note that wrote those words - I was quoting him. It might have been clearer if I had edited that or added (sic.).
So yes, the two differing descriptions do quite different things - which is why we have more than one description, and why we should look to the use of the utterance.
I maintain that the proposed dualism remains unsubstantiated... (see what I did there?)
The suggestion is, roughly, anomalous monism:
Quoting SEP
"The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog"
"quc hye vko jum tfb lrx dog wna zie ped ohr"
The difference is, obviously, that the first is a meaningful sentence, and the second is the same set of characters in random order.
Question: is that a physical difference? If so, what physical law describes it?
Physically, the two strings may be identical in terms of material composition same number of letters, same frequency of each character, even the same total length. To a physicist concerned only with particles and energy, there may be no measurable distinction.
But semantically from the perspective of meaning, structure, or information they are worlds apart. The first is an intelligible sentence with syntactic and semantic coherence. The second is a jumble, with no meaning (unless you're trying to hide a code in there!).
So: is that a physical difference?
In the narrow sense mass, charge, spin, energy no. Physics doesnt (yet) have a law that accounts for the meaningfulness of symbolic forms. Shannon's information theory quantifies information capacity, but it doesn't (and doesn't try to) account for meaning as such.
Yet obviously, for minds for us there's a difference that matters. A big one.
And this gets to the heart of the issue:
There is a kind of order semantic, functional, interpretative that is not captured by the physical description.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yep. Describable, as you hint, in thermodynamic terms or as Shannon entropy, or Kolmogorov Complexity.
And yes, there is also a difference in their intent.
I'm curious, what is the difference between physics and a physical ontology?
Quoting Banno
And also, doesn't thermodynamics work with the heat produced by a system?
Where do you see the measurable heat (Motion of atoms and molecules) in a sentence like:
"The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog".
The trick there is what they mean by "reduce". I think there's perhaps, and this is arguable, but a difference between abstract explanatory reduction, and ontological reduction.
So when he says it can't be reduced to physics, he's saying you'll never be able to understand the abstract principles and general patterns of human psychology by speaking in terms of quantum fields, basically. But that can (arguably) be true, even if it's still true ontologically that every instance of a psychological event in our universe is the direct consequence of quantum fields doing what they do.
You can pursue physics without any commitment to physicalism. You can be an instrumentalist, for example, and hold no view as to whether the objects of physics are ontologically fundamental. Whatever works.
But Then this ontology is not an explanatory ontology. So if this ontology does not explain, I don't know what is the point of maintaining it.
Too general. I said something specific. I didn't say "does not explain".
The fundamental (foundationalism) is precisely what should be criticized if it is not an explanatory ontology. It would be better to maintain a pluralistic ontology from my point of view.
I didn't say you said that. Rather, I inferred it
Well, then it does not explain this specific set of abstract principles. But don't you think that a fundamental and general ontology should explain them?
Conway's game of life is turing complete. That means you can implement the Haskell programming langauge inside conway's game of life. But trying to understand the abstract concepts of Haskell, by understanding them in terms of conways game of life, is a failure. Even if it's ontologically true that some specific instance of an implementation of haskell is implemented in conway's game of life.
Pyschology is like that. Psychology is best understood at a layer of abstraction that makes no (or very little, at least) reference to quantum physics. Even if it's ontologically true that every psychological being is composed of quantum objects.
But that is really the question. How can you talk about constituents without that being more than a naive intuition that cannot be carried out in scientific or philosophical practice, and above all that you cannot prove.
It makes perfect sense.
Quoting Corvus
I am not talking about people's beliefs and thoughts.
Quoting Corvus
I am not talking about dreams here but our experiences when awake. Dreams are an example of incoherent experiences though so it should make sense to you when I speak about coherence in our experiences when we are awake.
Quoting Corvus
Then consider your computer. Is your experience of your computer coherent?
Quoting Corvus
I am talking about my experience to be coherent only.
When something is coherent, it is meaningful. demonstrable, provable and verifiable. Can you prove your seeing a cup is coherent?
Quoting MoK
Beliefs and thoughts of people are part of the world which you experience in daily life.
Quoting MoK
Dreams are experience. Dreams don't exist outside of your experience.
Quoting MoK
Computers are tools for information storage, retrieval and searches for information. They are also communication tools. They are not coherent or incoherent.
Quoting MoK
The argument is too limited and unclear, but most of all misleading in its content and points. You need to clarify all the above points before progressing into P2 and C2.
By the object, I don't mean a mental thing but something physical that exists and has a set of properties.
Quoting PoeticUniverse
There are indeed two substances (apart from the mind), namely the brain and the object, and each has its own properties. The properties of the brain are the location and motion of its parts whereas the properties of the object are Qualia. The mind does not experience the brain but the object.
A substance is something that exists and has a set of properties or abilities. We have at least three substances in the case of the person, namely the mind, the object, and the body/brain. The mind is a substance with the ability to perceive and cause the object. The object is another substance that is perceived and caused by the mind and has its own properties, namely Qualia for example. The last substance is the brain which is a physical substance with properties that everybody knows. I have to say that the object is also a physical substance that interacts with the brain. It is however a very light substance so it cannot affect the brain significantly while it can be affected by the brain.
Quoting Wayfarer
Ok, I see, I changed the argument slightly to avoid confusion between the subject that I used as a synonym as experience, and the subject as experiencer.
Correct. I however wonder how through existential generalization one can conclude the existence of the object from the experience. This is the first time that I become familiar with existential generalization so I need your help to understand this. Would you mind elaborating?
I didn't say that the experience is tabula rasa. The experience has a texture and is the result of the mind perceiving the object. The object has a set of properties one of them being Qualia, namely the property that appears to the mind. The object has other properties allowing it to interact with the brain as well.
Quoting JuanZu
I haven't read Kant.
Quoting JuanZu
That is the duty of the brain to structure what the mind perceives, namely the object.
Quoting JuanZu
Well, excluding thought processes, all the mind perceives is unconditionally coherent and this is the result of the object being coherent. Of course, the object is coherent because it is shaped by brain activity.
Quoting JuanZu
I didn't say that the experience cannot be coherent. I said that it does not have the capacity to be coherent. I think I should have said that the experience does not have the capacity to be coherent on its own (I changed the OP accordingly). That follows from the definition of experience as a conscious event that is informative and coherent. An event is something that happens or takes place so its coherence cannot be due to itself but something else namely the object.
None of these. Something is coherent when it is consistent.
Quoting Corvus
I don't need to prove it. It is a brute fact.
Quoting Corvus
But beliefs and thoughts could be incoherent. That is why I want to exclude them from the discussion. That does not mean that the ultimate understanding of reality is incoherent. The ultimate understanding of reality has to be coherent but we don't have it yet so we have wait for it.
Quoting Corvus
Of course, your computer is coherent. Yet get on the screen what you type on the keyboard for example.
Quoting MoK
Seeing a cup in a location is your private perception. It lacks objective ground for anything being coherent.
Quoting MoK
It makes more crucial and important part of your experience is excluded from your premise, while relying on your personal subjective seeing a cup as ground for your belief on the contents of your experience being coherent. There is always possibility what you are seeing could be illusions.
Quoting MoK
Computer screen and keyboard either work or don't work. No one describes computer screen and keyboard are coherent.
Ideas and thoughts could be coherent. Rains, snows, sky, horses, birds, phones, computers and keyboards are not coherent.
We couldn't possibly live in a reality that is not coherent.
Quoting Corvus
We couldn't possibly depend on our experiences if what we experience is a mere illusion.
The point is not about living in a reality, but the fact that private experience is not objective ground for coherence.
Quoting MoK
Again, not the whole experience is illusion, but there are parts of experience which could be illusion.
The private experience is an objective ground for coherence. We don't have any other tools except our private experience anyway!
Quoting Corvus
Can you give me an example of something you experienced in the past that was an illusion?
That is an idea of absolute idealist and solipsism. Problem with these ideas is that they cannot appeal to or share objective knowledge.
Quoting MoK
Illusions are possibility in daily life of humans. Your seeing a cup in a location could have been an illusion. There is no proof you were seeing a cup.
I don't have an argument against solipsism and I am not endorsing it either. I have faith that other beings exist though. All I am saying is that we only have access to things through our private experiences.
Quoting Corvus
Here, I am not talking about the cup of tea but my experience of the cup of tea only.
Psychological state or personal experience cannot be ground for objective knowledge.
As far as 'substance dualism' is concerned, for Descartes, mind (res cogitans) and matter (res extensa) are of completely different kinds. The soul, res cogitans, is immaterial and lacking in extension (physical dimensions) but is capable of reasoning and thinking. Matter occupies space but is devoid of intelligence. The problem for substance dualism is explaining how non-extended incorporeal intelligence interacts with non-intelligent corporeal matter. Descartes suggest that this was via the pineal gland, but it is generally agreed that this is unsatisfactory and it remains an outstanding problem for substance dualism.
I'm sorry to say that you're not demonstrating a clear understanding of the questions you're raising, and so I have nothing further to add at this time.
You say that experience is coherent because the object is coherent, but at the same time you accept that coherence is given from the subject. Which implies redundancy. Object coherence is no longer a criterion for inferring dualism of subtances, since that criterion is found in both subject and object don't You think?
Formerly, f(a) ? ?(x)f(x). If the individual a is one of the things that are f, then we can derive that there is an x such that x is f.
The class picked out by "f" is not empty.
"Substance" is a pretty archaic term, not much used by philosophers any more. So existential generalisation shows that there is an individual, rather than that something has a substance. Existential generalisation just affirms the existence of an individual satisfying a predicate; it doesnt commit one to any particular metaphysical framework regarding substance. The vagueness of "substance" is apparent in the discussion in this thread. There's the Bundle theory to dal with - if substance is what "holds" properties, what difference is there between substance and a bundle of properties? Why not just drop the use of "substance" altogether? What is it that makes one substance different from another - and again, if it's just the properties they accept, why not just deal in terms of those properties? What is the relation between substance and essence? And the problem I focused on, how is it that different substances are able to interact?
Logic now pretty much deals in individuals rather than substances. Certainly that's the case in extensional first order logic.
See Landauer's principle, a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics. But obviously, there are far more ways to arrange the letters randomly than there are ways to arrange them into a sentence of English, so that English sentence has a far lower entropy.
Just to be clear, the suggestion that a mental even is exactly equivalent to a physical event is not something I would defend, but at the same time not something that we can rule out.
The reasoning is pretty simple. There are a very large number of physical states that a brain can be in, and we reduce these to a very few intentional descriptions. If someone maintains an equivalence between some physical state and being in lover, they must maintain that there is a commonality between your brain when it is in love with Adam and when it is in love with Eve, and that whatever that commonality is, is also found in my brain when I am in love with Eve. A tall order.
And then go a step further. Supose someone maintains that a brain is in love if and only if it is in State L. And supose that they find someone who claims to be in love, but who's brain is not in state L. Do we say that they are wrong? Or do we say that the theory "a brain is in love if and only if it is in State L" is wrong? That is, there are big issues with falsification and verification here.
Hence anomalous monism - being in love is a physical state but not one that can be set out explicitly and universally as a law. And the power of this approach is not that it is right, but just that it might be right - that there may be no explicit reduction of the intentional to the physical and yet there is nothing more to the intentional than the physical.
I think I've answered that question.
"quc hye vko jum tfb lrx dog wna zie ped ohr"
The difference is, obviously, that the first is a meaningful sentence, and the second is the same set of characters in random order.
Question: is that a physical difference? If so, what physical law describes it?
Wayfarer
Quoting Banno
Landauer's principle, and Shannon's law, have nothing to do with semantics or semiotics. They're about storage and transmission of information via electronic media.
Take a 1Tb hard drive, capable of storing millions of documents. Zero out all of the information, and the hard drive is physically identical. There would be no way to detect the difference between the formatted hard drive and the hard drive containing information, without interpreting the binary code on the medium. But that intrepretive act is also not anything described by physics. It pertains to a completely different level, that of meaning and information.
The point stands:
Physics can describe the medium the symbols, the binary states, the characters.
But meaning is not in the medium. It's not in the letters themselves, nor in the physical arrangement of bits on a drive. Meaning only appears in interpretation in the relation between the symbols and what they signify, which presupposes a system of signs, a language, and ultimately a mind.
Thats the core of the semiotic difference:
The same physical substrate can be either noise or message depending not on its physical structure alone, but on interpretive context.
No physical law explains that difference, because physics (at least in its classical formulation) abstracts away the subjective, intentional, and semantic dimensions of reality. Thats not a bug; its how physics works. But it also marks the boundary beyond which semantics, mind, and meaning begin.
And thats precisely the blind spot in physicalist accounts of mind and information.
That's just not factually correct. The formatted disk containing data has a lower entropy than a disk containing no information. And this is so regardless of the data having been interpreted.
Quoting Wayfarer
Semiotics requires symbols, which are produced by the consumption of energy, and hence involves Landauer's principle, and Shannon's law.
But can you deduce a specific sentence from a given entropy value?
And how would you measure the total entropy, if not with reference to the information? What constitutes data or information isnt determined by the physical properties alone. You cant measure the entropy of a hard drive in bits without first interpreting the bit pattern as information. Entropy, in the information-theoretic sense, is a measure of uncertainty or compressibility but that presupposes a code, a syntax, and a frame of reference.
Take the disk into a physics lab with no documentation, no file system, and no idea what the code means. Can they measure how much information is on it? Not without invoking interpretive assumptions. A completely randomized disk could have maximum Shannon entropy but also be completely meaningless. It could seem to contain information, when it is really 10 [sup]5[/sup] repetitions of "quc hye vko jum tfb lrx dog wna zie ped ohr".
Incidentally, this brings to mind the oft-repeated story about Claude Shannon asking John von Neumann what to call his new measure in information theory. Von Neumann reportedly replied:
You should call it entropy, for two reasons: first, the mathematical formula is the same, and second, nobody really knows what entropy is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.
That anecdote, whether apocryphal or not (and it is quite well-documented) captures the core of the confusion: entropy in thermodynamics and entropy in information theory are mathematically analogous but conceptually distinct. One concerns the dispersal of energy; the other concerns uncertainty in symbol sequences. Neither tells us anything at all about meaning.
Which is precisely the point.
Then it is like when we say that from a given neuronal synapse we cannot deduce a thought.
If so, then there is no reduction and we must say that the sentence is "something more" than a thermodynamic value.
But isn't the physical description also "something more" than the intentional description? The intentional description makes not mention of oxytocin.
Neither description contains the totality of the other description.
Well, no. How the system interacts with the data is physical. What we have is two differing descriptions of the same physicality.
Quoting BannoHow is the the idea of the quick brown fox jumping over the lazy dog a physical description of the squiggles "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog"?
Again, not so. Information content can be measured physically - that is where Landauer comes in - but that is only because there are agreed conventions of what constitutes meaningful information in the first place. And what makes information meaningful is not physical nor can be derived from physics nor reduced to it. And not seeing that is precisely what 'the blind spot of science' is referring to. (This was the subject of a marathon thread from about five years ago, Is Information Physical? although I've since come to understand the question is really about the nature of meaning, rather than information, per se, although it's a porous boundary.)
:lol:
What's meaning, if not what what is done with the information? Meaning here is just another term for use.
And use is physical. It involves actual processes that produce measurable physical effects in the world.
What's that, then?
Sorry. I don't understand.
Youre reducing Wittgenstein to a slogan.
Meaning is not just use in the reductive physical sense of mechanical interaction or behavioral output. Wittgensteins use theory of meaning operates within language games, forms of life, and shared human practices none of which can be captured in the vocabulary of physics (and incidentally, as you well know, Wittgenstein detested 'scientism' and presumably physicalism as an aspect thereof.)
The entire discipline of semiotics from Peirce to Eco to contemporary biosemiotics is concerned with signs and sign-relations, not with particles and forces. A sign refers to something; it stands for something else and that referential function is not something describable in physical terms alone. There is no law of physics that tells you whether dog means a four-legged mammal, or whether its someones last name.
Youre not seeing the meaning for the words.
Not I. Don't look to the meaning, look to the use.
The trouble is that the topic is waffle, and specifically it is waffle because it tries to mix two different types of language games - the physical and the intentional.
Waffles are breakfast. Make sure you use real maple syrup.
There's an obvious solution to this problem. Dualism. I.e., if you want to avoid that sticky sappy stuff.
No. I'm suggesting that they might be about the same things, under two different descriptions.
Suppose the psychological language we use in talking about intentionality consists of metaphors which map roughly to different sorts of physical activity occurring in our brains.
I see it as rather analogous to seeing the elements of C++ as metaphors for what goes on phyiscally in the hardware of a machine running C++ code. (In case that helps.)
That's a start. more like, consider a bit of code compared to a description of what happened in physical terms in the chips of your phone. These two descriptions describe the same thing. They are not metaphors. And we can look at it in terms of intentionality rather than physics and code...
If you have access to Philosophical Investigations, read form §118 through to about §130, but instead of thinking about it in terms of perception, think in terms of understanding or conceptualising. Then conceptualising something is not to arrive at a static mental image or predefined set of attributes, but a dynamic process that involves engaging with rules, practices, and contexts in a flexible way.
But this is waffle, syrup or no, and needs plenty more sorting.
All physical in nature? Reducible to physics? Able to be replicated in silicon? Oh, I see - 'anomalous monism'. Physicalism with whatever ad hoc admissions that need to be made to accomodate the non-physical nature of intentionality and interpretation. Slick!
I have a suggestion for why 'anomalous monism' even seems plausible. It has to do with history of ideas. Western philosophy devised 'substance dualism' and then defined mind as a 'thinking thing'. That was susceptible to the 'ghost in the machine' criticism. So, there is no ghost - only the machine, which is what any serious or sober thinker must accept. But then, if there seem to be things which the mechanist or physicalist paradigm can't accomodate, we'll call that an 'anomaly', and carry on regardless.
Am I warm?
They do not describe the same thing though, that's why they are different. To conclude that they do describe the same thing requires further premises or assumptions which need to be judge for truth or falsity, to determine how sound that conclusion would be.
Personal experience can be a solid ground to conclude that the experience is coherent. Our experiences when we are dreaming are mostly incoherent while they are always coherent when we are awake.
To me, the mind is the substance with the ability to experience and cause the object only. The mind has the ability to freely decide as well when it faces options too. The mind does not have the ability to reason or think. It perceives the content of the object. The content of the object however is very rich in the case of humans, it could be a form of perceptions, feelings, thoughts, etc. Perception, feelings, thoughts, etc. are due to physical processes in the brain. The mind does not have direct access to the neural processes in the brain but the object. The object and brain are directly interacting. It is through this interaction that the object can mediate between the brain and the mind. The mind is mainly an observer but it can intervene when it is necessary, for example when there is a conflict of interest between thoughts, feelings, etc.
Quoting Wayfarer
Matter occupies space but what we call intelligence is due to neural processes in the brain.
Quoting Wayfarer
The mind does not have any physical extension but to my understanding can present in different locations of the brain by moving very fast. The mind directly perceives and causes the object. The object either is affected by the brain or affects the brain. It is through these interactions that the mind can indirectly affect the brain or be affected. As I mentioned before the object is a very light substance so it can only affect the brain very slightly. This affection however can lead to a significant change in neural processes when there are options or in other words the brain is in an undecided state.
Quoting Wayfarer
I tried my best to explain things to the best of my understanding. Please let me know what you think.
My argument has two parts: 1) In the first part I argue in favor of the object that carries information and is coherent from the experience and 2) In the second part I argue in favor of the mind given the fact that the object cannot directly perceive its content, the information which is coherent. I am not arguing that coherence is given from the mind. The mind just perceives coherence in the experience.
What do you mean by "coherent"? Can you explain "coherence" and "being coherent"?
I already defined the substance in several posts. By substance, I mean something that exists and has a set of properties or abilities.
Quoting Banno
The bundle theory suffers from the problem of compresence of the properties.
Quoting Banno
Because those are the substances that interact with each other. This interaction is due to the properties of the substances.
Quoting Banno
The substances interact with each other through the forces.
By coherent I mean that our experiences when we are awake are consistent. Take the example of my experience of the cup of tea. It is where I expect it. It does not appear or disappear. Etc. Quite oppositely, our dreamy experiences are not always coherent. Things appear and disappear. Etc.
Not sure if your account on coherence is correct or not. My understanding of coherence is that when P is true, Q cannot be untrue, and vice versa. In this relation, P and Q are coherent.
From the point of view, your use of coherence seems to be wrong, and misleading, which directed you to the misunderstanding.
No, I don't mean that.
Quoting Corvus
You are the only person who is trapped in P1. Other people understood P1 and asked other questions. To be honest I don't know how I can help you. Perhaps others can help you.
Then you are contradicting yourself. Since before you had said that the brain, the subject, the experience made of what the senses give us something coherent. And you did so by denying that you were talking about a tabula rasa.
I wasn't asking for help. You seem to be distorting the facts.
I was just pointing out on the wrong use of the concepts. Because of the misconception and misunderstanding of the concept in P1, the rest of the arguments seem to be unclear and muddled.
That's what I read from the philosophical text books. Not making it up from the thin air.
Clarification on the concepts is part of the philosophical investigation and analysis.
I didn't intend to argue for the brain in this thread since that is the third substance and I don't have any argument for it now. I just commented on the brain since people asked for the mind and body interaction. The picture including the brain is simple: We have the brain, the object, and the mind. The brain in the case of perception receives sensory input and processes it. The object and the brain are interacting with each other so the object is affected by processes in the brain. The mind then perceives the object and experiences the content of the object namely Qualia.
Quoting JuanZu
I don't understand why you are talking about tabula rasa. Our experience of course has texture so-called Qualia.
I don't think that I am distorting the facts.
Quoting Corvus
People apparently understand what I mean by the coherence in the experience so I don't think that I am using the concept wrongly.
I mean if X, my cup of tea has a location, is the case that only X is the case and Y, Z, etc. which refer to my cup of tea having other locations are not the case.
Just keep denying blindly whatever has been countered, forwarded or pointed out, is not philosophical argument.
Quoting MoK
So whatever the majority believes is the truth? :roll:
Your seeing a cup in a location is a subjective visual experience. It has no truth value. It is just a perception. When you make up a statement "I see a cup.", it can be true or false, depending on the fact there is someone else witnessing the cup, heard your statement and agreeing with your statement. It is only true on that instance. Otherwise, it is a meaningless self talk or monologue, with no value of truth or falsity.
In contrast, a statement such as "A bachelor is an unmarried man." or "1+1=2" has truth value with no need for anyone witnessing or agreeing.
Huh?
Quoting Corvus
Why don't you ask people for help? Why don't you open a thread on "our experiences are incoherent"? We have been through this in this thread and your thread to a good degree. I don't see a point in repeating myself.
Could you give an example of something coherent or incoherent?
I don't need help. You do need help. :D
Your way of argument is just keep denying everything blindly. You don't accept or see the rational points.
I have already given you a clear explanation on coherence here.
I don't think so. You should at least have a doubt when the majority of people agree on something. Having doubt is a useful practice. :D
You just repeating yourself not seeing the truth. Why Don't you open a thread on the topic that our experience could be incoherent?
I asked for examples.
Please refer to the book on "coherence theory of truth" by by Cybil Wolfram, Philosophical Logic (London 1989)
I asked for example. Can you give an example of something which is incoherent, excluding our thoughts?
You need to read some basic philosophical logic books.
I already gave examples so it should be clear to you by now what I mean by coherence.
Anyhow, I am stalked by the emotionally motivated poster here, so I am not going to contribute anymore points in this thread. All the best & good luck.
Same here! All the best.
Refer to
1) The Oxford Companion To Philosophy Edited by Ted Honderich
2) Philosophical Logic by Sylbil Wolfram
for coherence concepts. Bye~~
Thanks for the references. I don't need them though since I know what I mean by coherence.
When someone is pointing out on the the possible misuse or unclarity of the concept in use, they are not necessarily seeking for help. They were looking for your opinion on the point supported by reasoning and evidence. But your replies seem lacking the rational explanations, and trying to rely on the pointless denials and even making up as if the questioner was needing help.
Sure, you can use the concept under whatever definition you set up, but it would sound too subjective and unclear which lacks objectivity in the meaning.
Anyhow as said, I have exited from this thread, so will not be progressing any further in this thread.
You already mentioned what you mean with coherence and I mentioned that that is not what I mean by coherence.
Quoting Corvus
Well, I already defined and gave examples of what I mean by coherence. None of that helped you. I also asked whether you could give an example of an incoherent experience that you ignored. So I cannot help you further.
Quoting Corvus
As you wish.
I've been traveling for a few days. Finally back to this..
I don't know if you guys are talking about the same thing I am. Let me try to describe my thinking in more detail.
A house is physical. You can build one. Put it together, brick by brick. You can go back forgetsl by digging up the clay, getting molds and a furnace, and make the bricks from scratch. You can even, in principle, start with particles, sticking then together to form the bricks.
Nobody will ask what the bricks, or clay & molds, or particles, have to do with the house.
Nobody will say that houses only seen to exist where they're are bricks (etc), but the connection isn't obvious, and nobody had given an explanation.
Thoughts are not the same.
You can give a physical description of the squiggles that we call writing in any detail you want.
You can discuss the medium. If they are on a computer screen, you can discuss the materials of the screen, and how electricity does whatever it does to make pixels different colors. If they are written on paper with a pen, you can discuss what paper is made of, what ink is made of, how ink remains in its place on the paper, etc. If they are scrawled on a wet beach, you can discuss the composition of the sand, how water holds the sand together, so it keeps the shape of the scribbles for a time, etc.
You can talk about the length, thickness, and angle of each mark making up the scribble.
You can discuss primary particles, and how their properties allow all of the above.
But you will not, regardless of which approach you take, or if you take them all, be discussing any of the thoughts found in the sentence The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.. Unless they read English, nobody who ever hears/reads your description of the squiggles will ever come to understand those ideas if they don't read English.
But writing is too far removed. You can also describe the brain states, from any angle, in any detail, of anyone thinking the thoughts in the sentence The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog., and, again, you will not be describing any of the thoughts in the sentence. Nobody who doesn't know what a brain is will suspect you're talking about thoughts. Those who know you're talking about a brain mighty day, "Oh! Is that thoughts? How does it do that?" Because there isn't any obvious connection.
We don't think a computer that is acting according to it's programming is having thoughts, even though we know it's programming haw meaning. But we know what the meaning is, because we put it there, and it's only to us that there is meaning.
Yes, describing things from the outside seems so far removed from what it feels like to be inside. Experience does seem drastically different, hence the hard problem.
I've been listening to a new audio book, a so called "audio documentary" that touches on this. It's called Lights On by Annaka Harris. Perhaps not up your street because she's an unabashed physicalist, but she explores concepts of fundamental consciousness because she's become increasingly convinced that that's more the right approach to talking about experience.
I've recently become aware of Harris. I'm impressed so far. Quite a few panpsychists call themselves physicalists (most famously Galen Strawson), and I'm very sympathetic to their position. I don't call myself a physicalist because people usually mean 'reducible to structure and function' by 'physical', and consciousness can't be so reduced. But I'm definitely a monist, which is part of what motivates physicalism (and materialism).
Not only did we 'put it there', but we enabled the worldview which allows us to think that the universe as a whole is devoid of it.
--
[quote=On the radical self-referentiality of consciousness, Michel Bitbol;https://bit.ly/4chf0mX]When we use a word for consciousness, we are... automatically led astray, because conscious experience is not something over there to be meant in any way. Once again consciousness is plainly here ; this here that submerges us ; this here that is presupposed by any location in space. Trying to mean consciousness is self-defeating, since what is allegedly meant is nothing beyond the very act of meaning it. It is radically self-referring.[/quote]
Thanks! I got Harris' audio. Only listened to the preface so far. Doesn't particularly make her sound like a physicalist. So this'll be my commute for a while
But there is meaning in the universe aside from any we put in it. DNA being the prime example. DNA means strings of amino acids and proteins. It is the basis of all life, and, I believe, the first step toward consciousness.
What I was driving at, is expressed by Michel Bitbol in another passage from the source quoted above:
[quote=Michel Bitbol] ...science was born from the decision to objectify, namely to select the elements of experience that are invariant across persons and situations. Its aim is to formulate universal truths, namely truths that can be accepted by anyone irrespective of ones situation. Therefrom, the kind of truths science can reach is quite peculiar : they take the form of universal and necessary connections between phenomena (the so-called scientific laws). This epistemological remark has devastating consequences. It means that in virtue of the very methodological presupposition on which it is based, science has and can have nothing to say about the mere fact that there are phenomena (namely appearances) for anybody, let alone about the qualitative content of these phenomena.[/quote]
There are many different types of monism. These can include "priority monism" - of which Neoplatonism is a type - "dual-aspect monism" - in which both mind and matter as two aspects of the same underlying given - and the far more familiar "substance monism" - of which physicalism is only one particular type (with idealism being its often mentioned opposite). Quantitatively addressed, physicalism is just one of a far greater plurality of possible monisms - with some such monisms not being logically contradictory (e.g., one can uphold a priority monism while cogently also at the same time upholding, for one example, a monism of objective idealism - else, an objective variety of dual-aspect monism).
@bert if monism is about everything being composed fundamentally of "one type of thing", what type of thing is at the center of your monism? Or is it not that kind of monism at all?
I'm not sure if anyone brought this up yet (haven't read the entire thread) but have you considered an "essence dualism" - this so as to avoid all the pitfalls of "substance dualism"?
Here is one possible example of an essence dualism; Here leaning on Hindu views as one example, one could then posit an essence of "maya (illusion or magic-trick in an ultimate sense of reality, which would in traditional views include both mater and mind)" and a separate essence of "pure awareness" (which is non-illusory actuality).
No worries if this doesn't make much sense or else work for you. But I thought I'd mention it just in case.
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BTW, the distinction between substance and essence can get easily complex and maybe at times convoluted, but for example:
Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substance_theory
vs.:
Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essence#Etymology
So roughly construed - to provide just one more example - the Neoplatonic "the One" could then not be a substance - but it might conceivably be referred to as essence (in at least certain interpretations of it, such as in addressing it as that which is "essential" to being itself - this in contrast to something like the aforementioned maya being essential only relative to existence (that which "stands out") at large ... but maybe all this is a bit off topic).
Again, though, no problems if this seems to hinder your position rather than help it.
I don't call myself a physicalist because most physicalists are emergentists about consciousness - the view that consciousness is reducible to structure and function seems a central tenet of many physicalists' views. But like physicalists, I don't believe in mental ectoplasm. I think everything we observe is structure and function.
Nor would I call myself an idealist, as that has the same error as physicalism but in the opposite direction. You can't get structure and function from just the property of consciousness. @javra mentions dual-aspect monism, maybe that's me.
On a physical level of understanding, all quanta themselves emerge from the quantum vacuum state:
Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_vacuum_state
... which is located neither here nor there but, quite literally, is physically everywhere - omnipresent.
In then interpreting the vacuum state to be physical, such that all physicality emerges from it in one way or another, physicalism can well be preserved despite the many different variants of quanta that are known to occur.
Funnily enough I had the same question myself the other day. "If physics has many quantum fields, does that mean it's not technically monism?"
I guess the reason it is is, even though they're different, they're still the same type of thing.
Theres an author you might find interesting if you havent encountered him, Federico Faggin. Hes a notable Silicon Valley pioneer who had a profound experience of spiritual awakening in his 30s and has gone on to devote his life to consciousness studies. His recent book is Irreducible:Consciousness, Life and the Physics of the Self. I am currently reading it, although its not an easy read. In any case, the whole thrust of the book is (as I understand it) the quantum nature of consciousness. He presents the idea of seity - the individual, conscious subject as a unique center of experience that cannot be reduced to anything more fundamental. The term is derived from the Latin se, meaning self or itself, and is meant to emphasize irreducible individuality and interiority. In some respects it is quite Liebnizian, although without Liebniz pre-established harmony. A seity is not an organism, but it is what the organism expresses. Its also close in some ways to the Greek psuche.
Yes, that's indeed up my alley, so to speak. Thanks for the reference. :up:
I also noticed your explication of substance/essence above. It's an important topic. I tried to introduce the topic of what substance means in philosophy as distinct from everyday use earlier in the thread. I think I'll write an OP on it.
A fellow "mystic"? Sure! I think I'd like it as well. :wink:
Quoting Wayfarer
If you do, substances aside, I'd be interested on any offerings regarding the notion of essence-dualism. Again, this for example as per the Hindu distinction between maya and pure-consciousness/atman.
To my understanding, Maya and pure awareness are different modes of experience, so essence dualism refers to a dualitymaya versus pure awarenesswhereas substance dualism is the fundamental model of reality.
Again, no problem if the use of essence rather than that of substance doesn't work for you. But to address this quote: pure awareness would here be non-illusory essence which is that via which maya (illusory essence) is experienced. All that is not pure awareness - to include both mind (thoughts, ideas, percepts, etc.) and matter (rocks, atoms, etc.) - is thereby different aspects of the same maya as illusory essence - a sort of property dualism of maya.
So yes, there is a duality of essences here, but it is not a duality between "different modes of experience": all experience of maya being contingent on and originating from the non-illusory essence of pure awareness (also termed "witness consciousness").
It is all right mate. I am interested to learn new things through exchanging ideas.
Quoting javra
I think that is the Mind/mind that experiences the state of pure awareness and Maya. Pure awareness to me is a mental state so it cannot experience Maya. I think that substance pluralism is the correct worldview in which the Mind/mind perceives and causes other substances.
Quoting javra
The Mind/mind to me is not a set of thoughts, ideas, percepts, etc. The Mind/mind is a substance that perceives other substances. These substances have properties so-called Qualia, what is traditionally called Maya by Buddhists for example, that are experienced by the Mind/mind. I think there are at least three substances, namely the Mind/mind, object, and physical. I discussed the Mind which is the uncaused cause in another thread here and here I am discussing the mind. The Mind perceives and causes physical whereas the mind perceives and causes the object. The object and physical are different substances to me so I don't believe in a form of property dualism where therein there is only a substance with different properties.
Quoting javra
I am afraid to say that pure awareness is only a mode of experience that is the result of the Mind/mind perceiving a substance.
Nor did I explicate that that's all which mind is, but these are certainly what I consider to be aspects of mind, rather than aspects of mater.
This then seems to me the crux of where we differ.
Mind, to me at least, consists of both (agency-endowed) awareness - not all of which pertains to consciousness - and, to simplify, the immaterial means via which these awarenesses (the awareness of consciousness, which is distinct from the awareness of one's conscience, from the different agencies - each awareness-endowed - of one's unconscious mind, etc.) then interact, combine, diverge, and communicate.
Differently approached, the term "mind" etymologically stems from the notion of memory, and memory too is a bundle of percepts - perceived by oneself as conscious awareness, which is thus aware of the memories one has.
All these thoughts, ideas, percepts - which are immaterial rather than being mater - are themselves experienced by what else than awareness (be this awareness either consciousness or not)?
This then will speak to the following:
Quoting MoK
I understand that but to me, the mind is a substance with the ability to perceive and cause the object. In this thread, I start with experience which is a coherent and informative conscious event, and conclude the substance dualism. Experience cannot be coherent on its own since it is only a conscious event hence there must be a substance so-called the object which is coherent. I then discuss that the object cannot directly perceive its content so I conclude the existence of the second substance hence substance dualism.
Quoting javra
Correct.
Quoting javra
Thoughts, ideas, percepts, and feelings are different forms of Qualia which is the result of the mind perceiving the object. The object and the brain are constantly interacting. It is through this interaction that the mind has indirect access to the result of neural processes in the brain.