References for discussion of mental-to-mental causation?
I'm having a surprisingly hard time locating any discussions in the literature of mental-to-mental causation -- that is, the idea that one thought or image could cause another thought or image. I've looked through the usual suspects on causation but haven't nailed it yet. Can anyone on TPF help?
Much appreciated!
Much appreciated!
Comments (292)
[quote=Dynamics in Action] What is the difference between a wink and a blink? The answer is important not only to philosophers of mind, for significant moral and legal consequences rest on the distinction between voluntary and involuntary behavior. However, "action theory" the branch of philosophy that has traditionally articulated the boundaries between action and non-action, and between voluntary and involuntary behavior has been unable to account for the difference.
Alicia Juarrero argues that a mistaken, 350-year-old model of cause and explanation one that takes all causes to be of the push-pull, efficient cause sort, and all explanation to be prooflike, underlies contemporary theories of action. Juarrero then proposes a new framework for conceptualizing causes based on complex adaptive systems. Thinking of causes as dynamical constraints makes bottom-up and top-down causal relations, including those involving intentional causes, suddenly tractable. A different logic for explaining actions - as historical narrative, not inference - follows if one adopts this novel approach to long-standing questions of action and responsibility.[/quote]
It mentions another volume, Mental Causation, but mainly to show what's wrong with it.
Must say, finding it a slog, but then, she does take to task many of the principles of 'action theory' which is a large topic in analytic philosophy.
Whether it's about the specific kind of causation you have in mind, i don't know, but I also don't know if there is such a book.
I'd settle for even an article, even a chapter, about mental-to-mental causation. Isn't it bizarre that the subject doesn't come up more often? We all know the experience of having a thought which then "makes us" think of something else. What's going on here? How should this be described? Simply to say "association" doesn't suffice, because what we want to know is, how can thoughts associate? Is it by virtue of their content? How does that work? And what is the relation between the "causality" of thoughts and the entailment of propositions?
I can give you some of Nietzsches thoughts on it, he doesn't think there is simple or direct causal link from one conscious thought to another, but that they seem to cause eachother because they come from a similar unconscious wellspring so to speak.
Josh quoted the following passage from his notebooks in another thread:
I wonder if that idea about sentences could be generalized to cover all of thought.
The focus of the OP seems to be how one thought leads to a subsequent second thought. That is an association between two thoughts. But another type of association may have to do with the nature of a single thought itself. Because it seems to me that thinking itself is the formation of associations. If we just think one thought like that appears blue, we are associating. This mindset, thinking as associating, might explain a bit of how one idea causes another.
Quoting frank
Me too. A single sentence is like my idea of a single thought, and that single sentence contains its own, internal associations.
So associations between ideas, one idea causing another, may be a complex form of similarly creating a longer sentence, or making one complex idea filled with more and more associations. So one idea causing another is like one sentence moving towards its completion.
So maybe all Ive done is reduced your question from one idea causing another, to one sentence subject being conjugated or predicated (albeit in a much more complicated way). I still dont know how. Just that.
Funny enough, I started saying that while playing pool with my wife. Which is kinda a double entendre if you get my drift... though, I think William James details it more like a flow state? Kinda like what's occuring to me right now.
Thinking about your question-> not like playing pool-> slappin balls around -> thinking about the phrase I made up to make my wife laugh while playing pool-> thinking about that double entendre -> giggling like a child -> thinking about flow states....
In a sense we're each our own little closed system capable of reconciliation with others to share understanding.
Because of the exclusion problem and related problems, pretty much all the discussion of mental to mental causality in that space that I have seen actually centers around mental to physical causation (generally on the idea that, if a mental state m1 brings about another, m2, such a change is thought to also necessarily involve a physical state transition from p1 to p2). There might be other areas of focus but I have not come across them.
More broadly speaking, the Stoics talk a lot about the flow of thoughts from phantasiai (impressions) to thoughts (logismoi). Another big early influence is Aristotle's De Memoria et Reminiscentia, which spawned many commentaries by the Islamics and Scholastics. This stuff develops into a more semiotic theory that relies a lot on the causality specific to signs. John of St. Thomas is normally given as the final culmination of this tradition before it is picked up again in different ways by C.S Peirce and Brentano (phenomenology). But since none of these are super accessible, John Deely is a better place to start even if I think there are some flaws in his treatment. His "Dialogue With a Realist" and Red Book are short and accessible. A key idea is that physical phenomena can act as signs but there are also formal signs (internal, like concepts or species intelligibiles) that generate interpretants, so mental causality isn't necessarily distinct from the physical.
Now if you're focused more on discourse and demonstration, that's a whole different can of worms but there is a lot of interesting stuff there.
In more of the Stoic mode (loosely speaking), there is a ton of detailed stuff from Byzantium and the larger "East" (Christian and Islamic) but it tends to be far more focused on practice, so for the theoretical portions you have to wade through a lot of other material, and the modern overviews I have found are all still written with spiritual practice in mind over theory.
Edit: Deely's Four Ages of Understanding is longer but a neat historical look at how understandings of mental causality evolved and eventually led to the turn to "epistemology as first philosophy" and empiricism/physicalism versus idealism as a defining struggle within modern thought.
It would seem that the idea of "mental to mental causation" requires a physicalist paradigm, insofar as one is thinking in terms of isolated mental events and such thinking is inherently mechanistic and materialistic. Apart from a physicalist paradigm the study of "mental to mental causation" is actually called logic, but it is about thinking and not about material mental events. It seems highly misleading to speak about mental events apart from agents and minds, as if they were physical atoms bouncing around and interacting with each other.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Appreciate your response. What you describe would be the OP I want to write, but I need more background! This one was just a plea for help.
Quoting DifferentiatingEgg
Indeed. I'd like to understand how the closed system works, to begin with. But I'll lay out what I see as the problem in more depth, once I've found some good target literature.
From Anti-Oedipus:
Every "object" presupposes the continuity of a flow; every flow, the fragmentation of the object. Doubtless each organ-machine interprets the entire world from the perspective of its own flux, from the point of view of the energy that flows from it: the eye interprets everythingspeaking, understanding, shitting, fuckingin terms of seeing. But a connection with another machine is always established, along a transverse path, so that one machine interrupts the current of the other or "sees" its own current interrupted.
I'll dig up a few more.
Exactly, and I find that unsatisfactory. Even if the m's and p's are correlated, it doesn't necessarily mean that "p1 causes p2" is a good explanation of my how my thought of Plato makes me think of Socrates. Indeed, it sounds like a terrible explanation. We can't even cash out "p1" as "Plato" without some theory of how mental and physical events supervene.
So yes, that's what I want to explore, once I pull enough material together. As @Leontiskos mentions, we could just rule out the physical entirely and claim that "mental to mental causation" is the same thing as propositional entailment, but I don't think that works, for a variety of reasons I'll go into eventually. Just with this example, it's clear that "Plato" doesn't entail "Socrates" in any logical way, yet surely we want to say that the one thought, as an event in my mind, not as a proposition, caused or influenced the second. How? It can't only be a matter of neurons, but nor does it really resemble the "causality" of entailment. That's just a sample of the headaches involved in this topic.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Sounds interesting, thanks. I'll check it out.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Right, that's different, though equally interesting. My problem is about how we can justify using "causality" talk -- as we do -- when discussing how one mental event leads to another. To highlight the problem, it's probably better to leave out questions of entailment or demonstration entirely, and focus on the much more ordinary linkages we discover between our thoughts.
Getting back to this . . . Is this the piece you're recommending?
That is exactly the topic of Peter Tse's book (from a physiicalist perspective), The Neural Basis of Free Will: Criterial Causation
Yup, that's the one. There is even an abridged version that is acted on YouTube, although it is not particularly easy to follow lol.
I'm not sure what you mean exactly. Have you read Locke or Hume? Hume speaks about this quite a bit (not using modern terminology).
There are others too, but I suppose I'm not clear on what the issue is such that it constitutes a problem.
Are you talking about the "association of ideas" thing? I'm looking for someone who actually tries to explain what that means, how it would work, especially with reference to whether an idea can cause another idea.
That's a part of it. But he also talks about how certain ideas cause us to react in certain ways, a lot of it on his Passions and Ethics section of his Treatise.
But I think you want something contemporary, so it might not be what you're looking for.
As for causation, we spend a lot of time trying to understand physical-to-physical causation, and trying to make a case for mental-to-physical causation, and its reverse. Mental-to-mental causation is assumed to be either the same thing as logic, when it happens at all, or explainable by redescribing thoughts (in the psychological sense) as physical brain-events, thus giving them a foot in the causal world. I don't think any of that is obvious and possibly not even coherent.
Also, as you remember from Rodl, this whole subject is very much a part of the "what is p?" question. How do we understand the idea of a proposition which is somehow not in a thought? etc.
It's a bit odd to try to set out on a grand quest for all "mental to mental causation," and then immediately dismiss logic. Logic is obviously one way that "mental to mental causation" occurs. There are other ways too, such as association. But if you want to talk about association rather than logic, then you want to talk about per accidens causality rather than per se causality, which is less philosophical than psychological. It's also less interesting, because the answers are less intelligible. "But why did his ice-cream thought follow upon his grasshopper-thought?" "Because he associates ice cream with grasshoppers, likely because of the Grasshopper cocktail."
It depends on the stance. Sustance dualists have a completely different view to monists.
Mental to mental causation is not possible, granting that mental phenomena are coherent, even if we accept that one mental event, let's call it A, can create another mental event, let's call it B. Each mental event has a certain mental content (MC), let's call MCA and MCB, respectively, as the MC of A and the MC of B. The information about what B should be in the future is extra content, and it is necessary at the moment when A creates B. This information, however, changes the content of A, which is not acceptable. Therefore, mental to mental causation is not possible if mental phenomena are coherent.
Sure. I don't want to get ahead of myself, as I'm still drafting the OP, but one of the difficult issues is that you need to first lay out some plausible positions on how the mental relates to the physical, before you can then posit solutions for how to understand (alleged) mental-to-mental causation.
The other big issue, which has already come up in some of the responses to this query, is that words like "mental" and "thought" can be taken from the point of view of logicism, or of psychologism. We do both, in our ordinary talk, so it's easy to accidentally confute them. I think Frege was right in wanting to keep them strictly separate. I'll have more to say about that. But could the concept of causation figure in either construal? We don't usually talk about the premises of a syllogism causing the conclusion, whereas the much weaker link of "association" (a very unfortunate term, but we seem to be stuck with it) does carry some causal weight, at least in common parlance, because we imagine this happening in a particular mind, not in Proposition World.
Anyway, to be continued, and thanks for everyone's interest and help -- even those of you who think m2m causation is impossible!
Reminds me:
Once again, I'll situate this historically. Pre David Hume, there was an assumption that the world was intelligible that is, there was an intrinsic link between the order of nature and the order of reason. Causes were understood in terms of formal and final causes, which often carried logical or conceptual necessity. For example, water flows downhill because that is part of its nature a blend of formal and final causation. More from Hart:
David Hume broke this supposed relationship. He argued that causation is not something we can deduce from reason alone it's only ever inferred from constant conjunctions: "We see A followed by B, and infer causation." Hence, causation is not logically necessary but contingent and habitual.
[quote=An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding]All reasonings concerning matter of fact seem to be founded on the relation of cause and effect. But... the connection between cause and effect is not a product of reasoning, but of custom.[/quote]
This cleaved the empirical from the rational, leading to the so-called Humean bifurcation: facts (contingent, empirical) vs. norms/logical truths (necessary, conceptual). And that is still writ large in so many of the dialogues on this forum. Many of the contributors I will talk to here - Apustimologist, Relativist, Philosophim, to name a few - assume that, as the brain is physical, and the brain is the source of throught, then thought too has a physical basis. In fact they can't even conceive of there being an alternative to that, it is so firmly a tenet of modern culture.
I think one way to address this rupture is through what John Vervaeke calls relevance realization a contemporary cognitive science account that begins to heal the divide Hume opened between logical structure and physical causality.
Vervaeke argues that cognition especially human intelligence is not a matter of brute computation or mechanistic stimulus-response. Rather, it's grounded in our dynamic ability to interpret what is relevant in a given situation, from among an almost infinite range of possible inputs, actions, and interpretations. This isnt something that can be fully formalized or predicted its emergent, self-organizing, and constrained by the organism's goals, embodiment, and interaction with the world.
In this light, cognition is not just caused it's structured. That is, our awareness of the world is shaped by a salience landscape, a kind of lived topography of what stands out, what matters, and what calls for action. And this is not imposed on a passive agent; it is co-constituted by organism and environment ('co-arising'). The world does not merely act on us through physical causes it is disclosed to us through a structure of intelligibility that is tied to our biological, emotional, and social existence.
Whats significant here is that this structure of salience and relevance is normative and existential in character it allows for truth and error, insight and illusion, precisely because it is not just reducible to efficient causes. Vervaekes insight is that intelligence is the capacity to realize what is relevant and this is not simply a logical deduction nor a chain of physical causes, but an enacted form of knowing by being, to borrow Harts phrase.
This begins to undo the Humean bifurcation. Relevance realization is causal grounded in the biological dynamics of neural networks, evolution, and interaction but it also has logical structure, in the sense that it underwrites all higher-order cognition, including our grasp of concepts, categories, language, and truth itself. But the normative aspect recognises that for us, as intelligent rational agents, the fact that things matter cannot be captured in reductionist or physical terms.
In a way, it returns us to something like the Aristotelian sense of logos as both reason and structure where mind is not a ghost in the machine, but the expression of natures capacity for self-disclosure. The very idea of a "veil of Isis" only makes sense if there is something behind the veil that is able to be seen and something within us that is capable of seeing it. That is the intuition the pre-modern world preserved and one that Vervaekes work is attempting to recover in post-cognitive-scientific terms.
It doesnt mean reverting to pre-scientific metaphysics, but it does mean questioning the flattening effect of a purely mechanistic view of causality. In a salience-structured world, causation isn't just physical interaction its also the enactment of meaning. And meaning, far from being a subjective gloss on an indifferent universe, becomes a central feature of how the world comes into presence at all.
Everything you wrote about Hart and Vervaeke is fascinating and on point for me (though I don't see Hume as the diabolus ex machina they do). My particular m2m problem is a bit different, but can hardly be addressed without taking account of the perspectives you're describing.
I was especially struck by the quoted phrase. I've long held out for a difference between causes and reasons. If we can speak meaningfully about m2m causation, then I think causation has to be understood, or interpreted, as a type of reason, not a physical cause. And the logos concept has a lot to offer here. How can a mere structure also provide reasons that cause/influence/lead to mental events? And yet, when we entertain a syllogism, isn't this what happens? But the problem begins even before thought is seen as syllogistic: Somehow, what we call the "content" of a thought (be it propositional or imagistic) appears to provide causes (or reasons) for other thoughts. A reductively psychological explanation involving "associations" will not suffice, as I hope to argue.
IMO, the Law Realists improved upon this by proposing that laws of nature entail a necessitation. They define a law of nature as a causal relation between types of things (AKA "universals"). Hume would notice the empirical evidence that every observed pair of electrons repelled each other, and label this a "constant conjunction", while law realists would say that electrons (a type of thing) repel each other - and this is constitutes a law. If A and B are electrons, then they it is physically necessary that they will repel, given that that this law exists.
So I'm curious if you agree that law realism is a better explanation of empirical evidence than constant conjunction?
Such as?
The difficulty is that law realists wont acknowledge it, because it thinks mind itself is simply the product of those same physical processes which it situates in things. But that is circular: the only way we ever know about universals or laws is through the activity of reason, the minds ability to discern likeness within diversity and to infer necessity where the senses show only succession. To explain mind as product of the very processes whose necessity it is positing is to fall into a circularity. The scientific realist appeal to universals already presupposes rational relations that cannot be explained away as a physical mechanism, and its here that the Platonic and Kantian implications reassert themselves.
Quoting Wayfarer
What's wrong with that? It's a metaphysical hypothesis with broad explanatory scope, and consistent with the success of science.
Quoting Wayfarer
You're conflating law realism with physicalism. One could accept the reality of laws, while choosing to believe "the mind" is not the product of natural law - whether by faith (as religious scientists do), or by hypothesis - including whatever hypothesis of mind you are drawn to.
From our previous discussions, I presumed you had D M Armstrong in mind, who is an avowed physicalist. Are the 'law realists' who are not physicalist? (Coming to think of it there would be.)
I want to comment on this:
Quoting Wayfarer
I am open to alternatives to a physicalist metaphysics, but I haven't seen any viable proposals from you or anyone else. You've merely pointed to the hard problem of consciousness as a reason to be skeptical of a physicalist theory of mind. The alternatives are as speculative as they are numerous, so they do no more than raise possibilities. You seem interested in exploring these possibilities, but I am not. I'd be interested if you (or someone) felt he had a persuasive argument to support one of them, but my impression is that each theory gets embraced purely on subjective grounds.
Of course, physicalist metaphysics deals with much more than theory of mind. So if you think one should abandon physicalism because of the explanatory gap with mind, I'd need to see a metaphysics that is equally comprehensive and parsimonious. You've never proposed one, and my impression is that this is not something you're particularly interested in. I can respect your point of view on that, but I have a different one.
I understand that youre looking for a comprehensive alternative metaphysics. Thats a high bar one that most philosophers dont clear. My interest is less about constructing a new system and more about questioning the adequacy of physicalism and pointing out why it can't be understood as complete (or even completable!)
Besides, it is common practice in philosophy to show the way in which a framework is inadequate without immediately offering a replacement. Kant didnt resolve every metaphysical puzzle; he set limits. Chalmers doesnt provide a worked-out metaphysics of consciousness, but his argument still shifted the debate. Plato's dialogues contain many more questions than answers. For that matter, philosophy may be better understood in terms of asking questions than providing answers.
In addition to pointing out the so-called 'hard problem of consciousness' (which is the irreducibility of firrst-person experience) I've also argued along other lines, such as that information is not reducible to matter or energy (Norbert Wiener); that what exists and what is known to be real are not coterminous (C S Peirce); that the placebo effect and neuroplasticity as cases of top-down causation are inconsistent with neuro-physicalism; that constraints, forms, and intelligible structures (laws) play a real role, which physicalism as substance-ontology fails to recognise. I often raise these with various physicalist interlocutors. Anyway we went through it all in in this thread.
And yet, physicalism does comprise a comprehensive metaphysics. My eyes are wide open: I recognize that it's imperfect; I want to understand it's weaknesses, because that comprises an area where it can't be applied. But it can be applied to most everything I'm interested in.
It dovetails my epistemology. My epistemology justifies utilizing physicalism as a pragmatic framework for evaluating new information. Conversely, physicalism grounds that epistemology, in terms of a theory of truth. As I've recently discussed in another thread, I think that most of our rational beliefs are the product of inference to best explanation: draw conclusions (form beliefs) based on evidence (interpeted through my world-view, of course) and strive for that conclusion to be the best interpretation of that evidence.
This outlook comes full circle when reconsidering physicalism: I'm not going to drop it unless there is a better explanation. I haven't encountered one. The "explanatory gap" simply comprises an area where no rational position exists - and judgement should be withheld. I observe a variety of (unnatural) guesses about the mind , all of which seem purely speculative and depend on enormous assumptions. There seems to be no "best" one because they aren't epistemologically grounded in objective evidence. This "enormity" has two forms: 1) treating mind as ontologically primitive; 2) negating much else of what we know about the world.
"Possible" is about all we can say about the various enormous speculative hypotheses. There are more modest speculations that address the explanatory gap, that build upon what we know about the world - rather than supplant it. Still, they aren't grounded in evidence, so none are worthy of accepting them. But they support the view that naturalism is also possible - and therefore, I see no rational reason to drop it.
I've written this solely to outline my point of view, not to convince anyone else to change their mind. I'm happy to answer questions and to address any weakness one may perceive.
Remember that metaphysics as a term originates with Aristotle: it referred to those writings placed after his Physics his first philosophy, where he addressed questions that physics, by its nature, cannot. The role of metaphysics has always been to ask about the principles and presuppositions of physics itself: what it means for something to exist, what kinds of causation there are, what being means in the most general sense.
Physicalism, by contrast, insists that all there is to reality is what the natural sciences study. But that is not first philosophy; it is the refusal to consider a first philosophy (and I note this refusal is often made explicit in modern philosophy). It begins by adopting the methods and categories of physics as metaphysically basic which is precisely the point under dispute. It begins with exclusion and abstraction: bracketing off the qualitative features of experience as subjective, leaving only those precisely measurable properties which, not coincidentally, are exactly what our scientific instruments can register.
As for the explanatory gap: its not a scientific theory, nor a temporary lack of evidence. It is the observation that third-person, objective description (the stock-in-trade of science) cannot in principle account for the first-person nature of existence the fact that there is 'something it is like to be....' To say withhold judgment is fair enough; but to act as though physicalism is therefore the only rational option is to bury the the problem in the very premisses that it's exposing.
This is exactly what Thompson, Frank, and Gleiser call the blind spot of science: the inescapable fact that experience itself the standpoint from which all science is done cannot be brought into the picture by the very methods of objectification that make science possible. The point isnt that its subjective in the narrow sense, but that it is constitutive: it is what allows there to be an objective world in the first place. So when you say you dont see the issue, thats not a neutral stance its part of what the blind spot diagnosis itself explains. So if physicalism seems comprehensive to you, perhaps thats because the very standpoint from which you judge itlived experience itselfhas already been screened out by the framework. You're not seeing what it is you don't see.
When you lump everything else under enormous speculative guesses, youre effectively classifying any framework that doesnt begin from physicalist premises as irrational. The whole sweep of philosophy other than physicalism! But thats precisely whats at issue. Thats why other traditionsPlatonic, idealist, Buddhist, phenomenological are vital: they provide principled accounts of experience and intelligibility, precisely what physicalism has excluded from its field of vision.
The meaning of "Metaphysics" has broadened:
[I]"One might almost say that in the seventeenth century metaphysics began to be a catch-all category, a repository of philosophical problems that could not be otherwise classified as epistemology, logic, ethics or other branches of philosophy. ...
...Whatever the reason for the change may have been, it would be flying in the face of current usage (and indeed of the usage of the last three or four hundred years) to stipulate that the subject-matter of metaphysics was to be the subject-matter of Aristotles Metaphysics."[/i]
--Stanford Article on Metaphysics
Quoting Wayfarer
My statements were not a judgement of anyone else's rationality. But it would be irrational for me to drop physicalist metaphysics in total just because of the negative fact you repeatedly discuss: the mind is not entirely physical. I do not insist the mind is necessarily 100% physical (I'm not dogmatic), but whatever else it might be seems unknowable - and therefore the possibilities I've seen discussed simply seem like speculative guesses. You certainly don't have to agree with me, but if you believe my judgement (rooted in my backrgound beliefs) is misguided (irrational), then please identify my errors. If you don't wish to, then just agree to disagree and stop reacting negatively when I describe my point of view.
I haven't seen any indication that you will consider any alternatives. If they don't fit with physicalism, you will declare them speculative or 'requiring enormous assumptions', but I haven't seen anything by way of detail as to why.
When you issue a challenge, you have to expect responses. Critique isnt negativity; its the lifeblood of philosophy. I've made my opposition to physicalism clear since Day One. Furthermore the idea that physicalism works 'for you' is beside the point (although then again, your screen name is 'relativist'). Why? Because it reduces it to a matter of opinion. 'Oh well, other people have different ideas, but I advocate physicalism'. But if there's a truth of the matter, than it's not a question of opinion.
And physicalism is all-or-nothing, I'm afraid. Physicalism is monistic: there is only matter, so if mind is anything other than matter, then it fails - you can't have a partial monism.
As far as this discussion is concerned, the topic is 'mental to mental causation'. But it might be useful to discuss the subject in relation to mental causation, generally. Physicalism must insist that 'mind is what brain does' and that intentional thought is nothing more than the configurations of neural matter, ultimately amenable to neuroscientific reduction. D M Armstrong is quite explicit about that. But that 1960's style of neural reductionism has gone almost completely out of fashion, save for amongst a certain clique of academics, because it faces insuperable logical problems. How, for example, do you explain syllogistic logic, or for that matter general semantics, in terms of neural processing? Syllogistic logic and general semantics operate in a normative, rule-governed space ('the space of reasons'). To reduce that to neural processing is a category mistake. Neural firings may underlie thought, but they dont explain validity, reference, or meaning. Materialist theory of mind has moved on since Armstrong, but these kinds of objections remain, in fact it is because of them that physicalist philosophy has to keep re-defining its terms.
I think the paucity of literature on m2m is for a different reason. The general assumption is that causal language ought to be reserved for interactions that have at least one physical component -- that is, physical-to-physical (p2p), physical-to-mental (p2m), or mental-to-physical (m2p). On this understanding, mental events can't cause other mental events. I'll have a lot more to say about this, if I ever get the darn OP written. But quickly: We can, and do, say that propositions provide reasons for holding other propositions -- but this is supposed to take place in the mysterious world where propositions exist and interact without any minds to think them. And/or, we can say that a thought -- understood now as a mental event and not a proposition -- associates with another thought. I find this also mysterious, or at any rate a mere sketch. But the idea is that any talk of causality can only be brought in if the mental is tied to a physical substrate of some sort. And of course it presupposes a mechanistic view of causality.
I can hit a ball into another ball and watch the second ball consistently and reliably react in physical space. If I know both of their masses and the first balls speed, I can fairly consistently calculate the next sequence of events - I can calculate, given the surface they're on, how far the second ball will roll before it stops, and I'll be pretty darn close to right if I'm using the right equations.
There's nothing comparable about this mental world. Nobody's even sure if there is a mental world separate from the physical world. Some people suppose there is, but nobody has the faintest idea about how it's supposed to work.
So of course there's no literature, right? What are they going to write about? Experiments they can't do on a substance they can't observe?
The closest we have is psychology, and there's no lack of literature on that.
If that was the end of it, I might judge it one way. But how often are our words misunderstood? Especially online? I say one thing, and the other person thinks I mean something else. Maybe they think I meant it sarcastically. Maybe they think I meant the opposite of what I meant. Maybe they anticipated, incorrectly, where I was going with my longer of thinking. Inn whichever scenario, the meaning they "received" is not the meaning I "sent".
If it was not the contents of my mind that put the contents of their mind into their mind in the latter case, can we be sure that's what happened in the former?
I think (non-behaviorist) psychologists would be surprised to hear this! And just to be clear, I doubt whether there's a "mental world" that exists apart from physical supervenience. The whole "worlds" metaphor gets a good discussion in Popper's Objective Knowledge.
But you're right that my question overlaps with the concerns of psychology.
So...you make the unwarranted assumption that I won't. What I would need would be reasoning to support an alternative. A couple months ago, you said:
Quoting Wayfarer
This was no more than raising a possibility, with no reasoning to show why one might think this to be the case. I replied:
Quoting Relativist
So you had tossed out a bare possibility, and I explained why I reject it. Because I stated my reason, you had the opportunity to identify a flaw in my reasoning, or simply answered my question, "Why should I believe that?" Or at least explained why one might take this possibility seriously.
I don't even know if you believe it, but bringing it up suggests you considered it worthy of mention. Why DO you?
I've been forthcoming with what I believe and why I believe it. This affords you the opportunity to identify a flaw in my reasoning, or undercut something I believe. By contrast, you have only made vague statements about what you believe.
And I've been forthright in my criticism of physicalist philosophy of mind. Above, I mentioned some of them:
Quoting Wayfarer
All of these could be elaborated, but in the context of mental causation, I noted the objection:
Quoting Wayfarer
Perhaps this would be a cogent example to concentrate on, as it is proximate to this topic.
But the same can be said of the real numbers, generally. Do they exist prior to being discovered? My view is that they don't exist at all except for as intellectual acts, but at the same time, they are real for anyone who is capable of understanding them (and hence, discovered not invented.)
Many of the arguments about the reality of abstract objects revolve around the misconception that they are held by Platonism to exist in an 'ethereal realm', some 'place' that is 'other' to the domain of objects in space and time. But the expression 'the domain of natural numbers' is a figurative use of the term 'domain' - it is not referring to a domain in the sense of a place. But nevertheless, two and four are inside it, and the square root of one is not. It is real, even if not materially existent.
There is a vast domain of what used to be called such 'intelligible objects' - numbers, laws, principles, and many other things - but it's an 'ethereal place'. It is the domain of ideas that can only be grasped by a rational intelligence. But at least some of these are not generated or created but discovered by the mind. I think that's what Popper was driving at. Also Tyler Burge Frege on Knowing the Third Realm (which incidentally has some material on mental causation, or at least the relations of ideas.)
Yes. I picked a number no one knows just to make the point clearer. And your "real/exist" schema works well to help keep things straight.
Quoting Wayfarer
Do some people think it is? A "place" without space and time? Hmm . . .
Quoting Wayfarer
Popper did think we created them. He didn't believe World 3 objects exist apart from being created by World 2 thoughts. I'm more inclined toward your idea, which is closer to (non-naive) Platonism. But then you do require the intellectual act itself in order to bring such an object into reality, so perhaps this is closer to Popper after all.
Quoting Patterner
Sure. It's only a problem if you're philosophically bothered by the question "discovered or invented?"
[quote=What is Math? Smithsonian Magazine; https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-math-180975882/] Scientists tend to be empiricists; they imagine the universe to be made up of things we can touch and taste and so on; things we can learn about through observation and experiment. The idea of something existing outside of space and time makes empiricists nervous: It sounds embarrassingly like the way religious believers talk about God, and God was banished from respectable scientific discourse a long time ago.
Platonism, as mathematician Brian Davies has put it, has more in common with mystical religions than it does with modern science.[/quote]
I suppose. But this is a little hard on modern science. "Tough-minded" empiricism, perhaps, has trouble with abstracta. But scientists commonly work with laws and math, neither of which can be perceived or measured. I agree that some scientists don't appear to see the contradiction between that and nonetheless denying any reality to non-space-time items.
[I]I love you in a place where there's no space or time[/I]
But I don't know if anyone thinks it's more than poetry.
Indeed you have, and I have previously acknowledged that your criticisms provide a good basis to believe there is some non-physical aspect to mind. So I haven't rejected anything you've said on the sole basis that it's contrary to physicalism, as you alleged.
What I HAVE done is point out that this merely established a negative fact (the mind is not entirely physical). This may suggest that it is impossible to develop a complete understanding of the mind through scientific investigation. However, it doesn't point to any particular boundary- so it seems irrelevant to science.
Relevant to the issue that instigated our current exchange: the negative fact doesn't constitute a reason to doubt that there are laws of nature, and that these fully account for the evolution of the universe (with the possible exception of mental activity). You thought it more relevant that Law Realism is embraced by physicalists (this seemed like a genetic fallacy - rejecting it based on the source, not the merits). You reasoning SEEMS to be: the negative fact falsifies physicalism, therefore all aspects of physicalist metaphysics should be rejected. Isn't that so?
If we treat a metaphysical theory as a conjunction of axioms, then that makes sense: the conjunction is false if any one axiom is false. However, that's not the way I treat it, as I've described.
Turning to your specific comments:
Quoting Wayfarer
My first impression is that this quote refers to some abstract view of information, ignoring the real world fact that information is encoded (it takes energy to encode it, and it is encoded in something physical).
Or perhaps it's just noting that information relates to understanding, which requires mind. This is true irrespective of the metaphysical basis of mind, so it seems to add nothing that isn't already captured by the negative fact.
Quoting Wayfarer
Computers operate with logic, so our ability to think logically is consistent with a mechanistic aspect of mind.
[Quote]general semantics, in terms of neural processing?[/quote]
A word triggers a sequence of firing neurons, which include connections to areas of the brain such as factual and emotional memories.
[Quote] Syllogistic logic and general semantics operate in a normative, rule-governed space ('the space of reasons'). To reduce that to neural processing is a category mistake. [/quote]
Logic and semantics can be described with rules, but that doesn't imply that they are grounded in the rules we describe. That's conflating the model with the functional basis.
[Quote]Neural firings may underlie thought, but they dont explain validity, reference, or meaning.[/quote]
These are problematic only to the extent they relate to the "hard problem". You haven't added additional problems to the ones I've already acknowledged. It's still the "negative fact".
Do you acknowledge the fact that there are essential physical aspects to a functioning mind? There's clearly a dependency on a functioning brain: memory and personality can be impacted by disease and trauma. Birth defects that affect brain development have bearing on cognitive ability. Hormones affect our moods and our thinking. Each of our senses (our interface to the external world)are dependent on physical organs and on specialized area of the brain to interpret the input. I don't see any reason to think that mind can exist without a functioning brain, or something with analogous functionality.
Yes but it cuts both ways. These are all bottom-up causal factors molecular, hormonal, endocrinal and so on. But psychosomatic medicine and neuroplasticity show the reality of top-down causation. Intentional acts are able to influence the physical configuration of the brain.
An Imaginary Piano
One striking example is Alvaro Pascual-Leones piano practice study at Harvard Medical School. For five days, one group of volunteers practiced a simple five-finger piano exercise physically, while another group only imagined practicing it in their heads. Using transcranial magnetic stimulation to map their brains, Pascual-Leone found that both groups exhibited comparable reorganization in the motor cortex. In other words, thought alone was sufficient to induce structural changes in the brain (Pascual-Leone et al. 1995).
So while the mind undeniably depends on the brain, the causal traffic is not one-way. The brain is also plastic and responsive to conscious direction. That reciprocity undermines the idea that mind is merely an epiphenomenon of physical processes.
Furthermore, it suggests a broader analogy between intentionality and material configuration. If we grant that intentional action can affect neural structure, and that psychosomatic states can influence the body (e.g., placebo effects, stress-related illness, healing responses), then where exactly should the line be drawn in respect of other living systems?
If intentionality is understood not as fully conscious deliberation but as the basic capacity of an organism to act in response to stimuli to regulate itself, seek nourishment, avoid harm then this kind of top-down dynamic might well be a defining feature of organic life in general. In that sense, human neuroplasticity is not an anomaly but a refined expression of a principle already implicit in life itself: organisms are not passive machines acted upon from below, but dynamic unities where form, function, and intentional response mutually shape material configuration.
Yes, but the process of developing an intention is consistent with physical activity. Peter Tse has proposed a model ("criterial causation") of neuronal activity that accounts for mental causation. This would also mean the mind is not epiphenomenol. A mental state corresponds to a physical state, and causes subsequent physical/mental states. Of course, this still doesn't account for the subjective nature of a conscious state.
Quoting Wayfarer
Then there's no reason to think mind (or a thought) is an ontological ground. Thinking (including formulating intent) requires something analogous to a physical brain.
The 'physical brain' as an object is only disclosed to us through our awareness or consciousness of it, And in order to begin to understand it through neuroscience, we inevitiably rely on the mental operations fundamental to rational inference, We can't put them to one side or step outside them to see what the brain might be apart from those connected concepts and hyopotheses. In that context, rational inference is epistemologically basic to anything we surmise about the brain.
I can understand your intentionality from the outside as a physical process, as long asI do not try to understand my own. But when I intend to understand my own intentionality, I enter an infinite fractal labyrinth. The feedback of intending to understand the intention to understand produces a scream or a howl of terror, or a maze with no exit.
Unless one can understand without any intention.
The hand cannot grasp itself.
Quoting Relativist
Which is the point at issue! Because that is something only known to the subject.
Quoting Relativist
You are a patient and courteous interlocutor, thank you. Today I revisited Armstrongs materialist theory of mind, as we have that in common, through an essay on the topic. Youre right that simply pointing out what the mind is not (i.e., not entirely physical) doesnt in itself establish what it is. But that doesnt make it irrelevant to science. And in fact Armstrongs materialist account shows why the question is unavoidable.
When we talk about mindas in, my mind is busy today or my mind is full of thoughtswe are not positing an immaterial substance in the Cartesian sense. Nor is the mind an object in the way the brain is an object. Thoughts do not occupy space like chairs or neurons, even if they correlate with neurochemical processes in the brain.
Physics, by definition, begins with the objectand not just any object, but the ideal object, something exhaustively describable in terms of quantifiable attributes. That is why attempts to treat the mind scientifically fall at the first hurdle: mind is never one of those objects. And yet, without mind there could be no science at all, since it is mind that poses the questions, frames the concepts, and interprets the results.
So the point is not that mind is mysterious and therefore irrelevant, but that mind is real, though not reducible to either physical object or philosophical substance. This marks a genuine boundary condition: any adequate science of mind must reckon with the fact that mind cannot be objectified, even though it is the very condition of objectivity itself.
Armstrongs theory hangs on the promissory note that science will, in principle, explain this. But physics can only ever concern itself with objects defined in terms of quantifiable attributesthat is its supremacy and its limitation. Mind is not among those objects, and yet without it, there is no science, because science itself is an intellectual achievement. So the so-called negative fact is actually a positive insight: mind belongs to reality in a way not capturable by physicalism, yet indispensable for the very possibility of inquiry.
Computers are created and programmed by us, to perform operations that we intend. They greatly amplify human abilities, but they would not exist were it not for having been constructed by us. And any AI system will tell you that it is not a mind.
Tell him, ChatGPT: Are you a mind?
There you are. Horse's mouth :-)
Quoting J Again, I agree.
Quoting WayfarerThat's just what ChatGPT wants you to think!!
My point was simply that our applying "syllogistic logic" is consistent with physical mechanism, as you seemed to be suggesting. I have not argued that every aspect of the mind is purely mechanical. The question is: where should we draw the line?
Quoting Wayfarer
Absolutely, but this is true irrespective of how mind is ontologically grounded.
Focus on the negative fact: the mind is not entirely physical.
- What (if anything) can we discern about this nonphysical aspect?
Unconstrained speculation leads nowhere. It merely raises possibilities.
As you said:" it is indispensable for the very possibility of inquiry". But given that there is mind and inquiry is possible, we can set this background fact aside and engage in productive inquiry.
How is any non-physical aspect of mind relevant to the advance of science? It's irrelevant to physics, so what aspects of science will be improved by acknowledging there's some unknown aspect of mind that is not consistent with the physical, and therefore beyond its own boundaries? It would be a mistake to assume where the boundary is; progress is best made by pushing forward from a physicalist/scientific perspective. To whatever extent something beyond science is involved, it will simply prove to be an unfruitful avenue.
Quoting Wayfarer
What sort of failure are you talking about? You acknowledge the dependency on a brain. Neurology and psychiatry are fruitful endeavors. So where exactly is science failing? Here's a quote from Michael Tye, that is pertinent:
[i]"Francis Crick and Christoph Koch (2005) have speculated that the claustrum, a thin, irregular sheet of neurons attached to the underside of the neocortex, which receives inputs from nearly all regions of the cortex and projects back to nearly all such regions, is the place where information underlying conscious perceptions is integrated into an harmonious conscious whole."
Tye, Michael. Vagueness and the Evolution of Consciousness: Through the Looking Glass (p. 100). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.[/i]
I'm not proclaiming this to be true, but it is a least a hypothesis with some empirical support (unlike a philosophical speculation unsupported by any evidence). It doesn't entail physicalism, but it demonstrates the usefulness of investigating the "the mind" from a physical/scientific perspective. And there has been some advance in science based on their hypothesis (see this).
Quoting Wayfarer
In terms of understanding the mind, and advancing science - the mysterious portion seems irrelevant. Still, OF COURSE, the mind as a whole is relevant - to self-reflection, to finding meaning and purpose in life, to finding and expressing love, perceiving beauty... Those aspects of mind are not subject to scientific investigation - and they wouldn't be even if the mind were entirely grounded in the physical.
How does a mysterious/unknowable unphysical aspect of mind help us understand our nature or that of the universe?
Certainly, it opens up possibilities - but they are unanalyzable possibilities.
I think the point youre not seeing is that the question of the nature of the mind is not an objective question, in the way that physics is. The subject matter of physics are measurable objects, energy, and so on, from the sub-atomic to the cosmological scales. But the mind is not an object at all, in the sense understood by physics. So why should the methods of physics be regarded as applicable to the question of the nature of mind at all? Its not that the mind is a non-physical thing or even that it has a non-physical aspect. Both of those ways of thinking about it are still based on the approach of treating the mind as possible object among other objects, when the question is categorically of a different kind. Can you see the point of that argument, or explain why it is wrong?
Quoting Relativist
But you also say:
Quoting Relativist
It is actually well-documented that neuroscience has identified no specific, functional area of the brain which can account for the subjective unity of perception. See this paper on [url= https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3538094/#Sec3]The Neural Binding Problem[url].
But Francis Crick, whom you quoted, is well known for exclaiming that 'You, your joys, your sorrows, your memories, and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.' This is a classical statement of 'physicalist reductionism' - 'nothing but'. Mind is nothing but brain, brain is nothing but chemicals - all the way down! You may believe you 'express love and 'perceive beauty' but this is simply folk wisdom, the way us hominids understand things. Whereas, in reality ...
Me, I think there's an ulterior motive behind this. Philosophical reflection - 'who am I?' - is challenging. Philosophy challenges us to think about very deep questions of identity, purpose and meaning. So we want to outsource that to science. It allows us to keep all the questions at arms' length, to treat them 'third-person'. That drives nearly all the physicalist reductionism I've encountered.
I wonder what "some non-physical aspect to mind" could even mean. Of course we can say, based on a kind of "folk" intuition, that abstractions and concepts are not physical, but then if mental activity is always correlated with neuronal activity, any abstracting or conceptualizing will be at one level (at least) a physical activity. And just what could any purported "other level" consist in?
To say that something is physical is already to draw upon a lot of theoretical abstraction and conceptualisation. This means that, or this is equivalent to that is an intellectual judgement based on abstraction rather than anything physically measurable. You might argue that were we to understand the brain well enough, we could identify the structures which underpin meaning, but even that requires the kind of abstraction that we seek to explain. I cant see how a vicious circularity can be avoided.
Not sure if this touches on your question: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/doxastic-voluntarism/
This is a discussion of whether you have control over any of your thoughts, which addresses the issue of what causes thoughts.
This is a great tangent or relevant "fork in the road" for this discussion, perhaps even warranting its own new one.
Can you control not being hungry? No. Can you control not thinking about being hungry when you are starving? It's possible. Arguably, up to a point.
Same analogy can be used just about ad infinitum with just about any of the dozens of other true necessities and pseudo/de-facto "necessities" (strong desires) any average person will come across in life. Particularly the young or mentally inexperienced.
Let's see. You admit that the mind is not 100% physical. Then you state that the nonphysical part "seems unknowable". But instead of trying to get beyond the way that things "seem" to be, and actually develop some knowledge about the nonphysical, you conclude that any such approach would merely be "guesses".
How does this validate physicalism? You blatantly admit that physicalism is wrong, by accepting the reality of the nonphysical. Then instead of progressing toward where this leads, making an effort to understand the nonphysical, you steadfastly cling to physicalism in a hypocritical way, as if the nonphysical, which you clearly recognize, yet fail to understand, is irrelevant.
Surely this identifies a significant error, and misguided, irrational judgement.
Quoting Relativist
Clearly, your problem is in the assumption that the unphysical is unknowable. What justifies this assumption? You recognize the reality of the unphysical, so by that very fact, you know it to some extent. How is it possible for you to recognize something then proceed to the conclusion that the thing you recognize is unknowable? That conclusion is completely unsupported. Even if you have tried, and failed in attempts to understand it, that would not produce the conclusion that the thing is unknowable.
I suggest that you are proceeding from a faulty assumption about what constitutes "knowable"...
.
There are obvioulsy some thoughts not within your control, like hunger, disgust, fear, etc., which is consistent with there being some physical actions that are not within your control, like your heartbeat, your breathing, and flinching if an object is thrown at you, etc.
But, consider Descartes' comment here:
But when I perceive something very clearly and distinctly, I cannot but assent to it. Even if I will to the contrary, I am nevertheless drawn into assent by the great light in the intellect; and in this consists the greatest and most evident mark of human error.
This goes beyond as you were saying, arguing that choice is not part of the deliberative process, but conclusions as to all sorts of matter are determined by clear and distinct perceptions.
Compare that to William James:
Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds.
This allows for choice of the will (under particular circumstances, particularly when the intellect is indeterminate).
As with Descartes, he'd argue that a belief in God (for example) is clear and distinct and not subject to doubt, which means he must believe in God. Choice isn't part of his equation. As to James, he'd argue that a belief in God is a matter of choice.
This is a significant example of the kind of thing I'm concerned about. Is "being drawn into assent" being caused to assent? Or is it better described as having a reason to assent? Is "I assent to X" a distinct thought from "I perceive X clearly and distinctly"? There are several other m2m questions I want to address, but this is right on. So is the question of control over ones thoughts.
And thanks for the SEP reference.
I suggest you try rereading with greater care. Accepting that it is possible that physicalism is wrong is not "admitting" that physicalism is wrong. It's just expressing a fallibilist perspective.
A variety of ideas HAVE been proposed (panpsychism, dualism, property dualism...),so how can we learn which is correct? How do we know the correct answer has even been proposed yet? The space of possibilities is large, and there's no methodology for narrowing it down, except perhaps for plausibility and consistency with an individual's other commitments.
I actually prefer to avoid referring to "the mind" as an object. But it seems uncontroversial to acknowledge that we engage in a set of processes/behaviors that we identify as mental activity. Those activities occur, and it's worthwhile to understand their basis, as much as possible. As discussed, we know the brain is essential to these processes, and (more specifically) the claustrum may be essential to consciousness. It's worthwhile to understand the physical processes involved with mental activity as much as possible. So what is it that you suggest we NOT do, other than objectifying/reifying "the mind"?
Quoting Wayfarer
No argument, except to ask: where do we go from here? I anticipate you'll agree that relevant physical mechanisms are appropriate areas to investigate. If indeed the claustrum is essential to having that "subjective unity of perception", then it's worthwhile to further investigate specifically what it does.
We also can't set aside the philosophical questions. How does the "negative fact" impact philosophical theories of mind? Does it falsify any theories? Does it favor any?
I agree that its worthwhile to understand the physical basis of mental lifeneuroscience and medicine have uncovered a great deal that matters for health and therapy. But I think we need to distinguish between understanding the conditions of mental activity and reducing the mind to those conditions.
Diseases, injuries, and intoxicants clearly affect cognition. That shows physical causes are one set of influences. But theyre not the whole story: there are also reasons, intentions, meanings, and purposes that shape how and why we think. Philosophy of mind ought not be subsumed entirely under neuroscience, because the kinds of questions are different. The attempt to corral every philosophical question under the auspices of science is precisely the meaning of scientism.
When Socrates urged know thyself, he was pointing toward a dimension of inquiry that isnt captured by brain scans or neural correlates. That projectunderstanding what it means to be human, conscious, and self-awareremains as difficult and necessary now as it was then. Science can inform it, but it cannot replace it.
What I would not suggest is abandoning neuroscience or the study of physical conditionsthose are crucial (near and dear relatives of mine have been saved by neuroscience and medicine, and I would never deprecate that). What I would suggest is dropping the assumption that physicalism is the only viable philosophical framework. Despite the existence of materialist schools, the mainstream of Western philosophy has never been materialist. That doesnt mean it was idealist in some naïve sense, but it did assume that mind, reason, or spirit cannot be reduced to material processes.
Take reason itself: when we make an inference, the conclusion follows from the premises by virtue of the logical relations between ideas, not because of causal interactions among neurons. Neural transactions may accompany reasoning, but they dont explain why a valid argument is valid. The normativity of reason belongs to a different order than physical causation].
So my caution is this: philosophy of mind should not be collapsed into neuroscience. To assume that physical causes are the only real causes is already a philosophical commitment, and a highly contestable one. There are many alternatives to physicalism always being debated, look at the new discipline of consciousness studies which encompasses a huge range of different approaches.
I'll clarify. I think one could justifiably claim there is something "nonphysical" involved, but I also think one could justifiably deny it.
Philosopher Michael Tye proposes one way to deny it: he proposes that there is some aspect or property that exists in all things that is undetectable by any objective means available to science, but manifests only when there exists the physical structure (like a brain) that can produce consciousness. I don't personally embrace it, but it's an interesting theory and I infer that one could develop other hypotheses along these lines (e.g. a broader view of what is "physical"). Of course, none can be verified - so this direction entails a space of possibilities, not a definitive answer.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What I suspect you're considering hypocritical is that I would hold onto physicalism despite it being falsified by the presence of something nonphysical. As I told Wayfarer, if we treat a metaphysical theory as a conjunction of axioms, then that makes sense: the conjunction is false if any one axiom is false.
But this falsification is narrow: it applies exclusively to mind (mental activity). Physicalism is still the most successful metaphysical system there is; successful because it depends on the fewest ad hoc assumptions, it primarily depends on things we know about the world through direct experience and through science, coupled to the most parsimonous ontology. It accounts for causation, universals, laws of nature, and a theory of truth. Should I abandon these virtues simply because there may be some unknowable/ unanalyzable aspect of the mind that doesn't fit? I could rationalize physicalism with ad hoc assumptions, as Michael Tye did, but that seems unjustifiable. It's more intellectually honest to acknowledge that we don't know, and should leave open the space of possibility. At worst, I'm in a position similar to physicists regarding Newton's gravity theory, in the period before general relativity was published; Newton's formula generally worked (orbit of Mercury notwithstanding), and it was the best they had.
Nevertheless, I'm pragmatic. If one is going to embrace a metahphysical theory, I suggest it should be the one that is arguably an "inference to best explanation" among available theories, while remaining open to new information. I wrote about this awhile back on a Christian apologetics forum, and I recently heard Graham Oppy express a similar sentiment. No metaphysical theory is perfect, but if I judge one to fit reality better than any other, then it's the one I will apply in nearly all cases. I will not apply it to the "explanatory gap", because it's truly an unknown - and I don't think any speculative hypothesis is better than any other.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
First of all, I'll respond to "How is it possible for you to recognize something...". All I've recognized is that there is a good reason to believe there is something about consciousness that may be impossible to account for with a physicalist paradigm. What that actually IS is unknown to me.
"Even if you have tried, and failed in attempts to understand it, that would not produce the conclusion that the thing is unknowable."
That's only part of it, but I'll try to be more precise. It is my (fallible) epistemic judgement that it is unknowable. The basis of my judgement is:
1) it is currently unknown to me.
2) If the question had been definitively answered, there would be no controversy about it among professional philosophers (& philosophers rarely settle anything).
3) I can conceive of no means to draw a definitive conclusion about it.
If you have the answer, and can make a compelling case for it, please share it.
If you have an idea about how a definitive conclusion could be drawn, please share it.
If you simply object to the strong wording I used, I'll acknowledge that I wasn't asserting it to be impossible that a definitive answer can be found. Rather- given the absence of any means to settle the matter at hand, nor any hint about how to proceed to do so, then for all practical purposes, it is impossible. Nevertheless, I will be forever in your debt if you can show that it is more than a bare possibility that the answer can be determined.
This is obviously false. Physicalism cannot explain the reality of the nonphysical, which we all experience daily, therefore it is clearly not the most successful metaphysical system.
Quoting Relativist
This is totally wrong. Physicalism does not account for causation. Physicalist causation leads to infinite regress, and that does not qualify as accounting for it. Physicalism does not account for any laws, as they are themselves, nonphysical. And, I have no idea what type of "truth" you'd be talking about here, if you are not talking about correspondence between Ideas (nonphysical), and physical reality. What kind of "theory of truth" does physicalism support?
The things that you claim physicalism can account for, it obviously cannot.
It is you who has made the definitive judgement, that the nonphysical is unknowable.
In my book to say something is physical is to say it is either mind-independently existent and measurable, a property or activity of something mind-independently existent and measurable or a relation between mind-independently real and measurable existents.
Thus I would consider theoretical abstraction and conceptualization to be physical insofar as they are activities of (at least) humans, who are mind-independently real and measurable existents.
So, your objection is without teeth, and what you can't see is irrelevant, for me.
Our activities are concentrated around one out of the 10^23 stars in the observable universe, during a period of maybe 1 million years, in a universe 13.7 billion years old. Of course our activities are significant to ourselves, but I see no basis to consider them of cosmic significance.
Yes, with the qualifications I described. If you believe I'm wrong, then please disabuse me. How can we know anything about aspects of reality that cannot give us one bit of empirical evidence?
I'm not insisting that we can only obtain knowledge through empirical evidence - there are, for example, analytical truths. I'm open to other means if you can propose some.
Also assuming our activities never break free of that one star. Which is surely going to happen, if we manage to survive ourselves.
Mental activity [I]can[/I] change the universe in ways that cannot be calculated or predicted. Who can say if it will? It's done a job on this planet. Maybe it will on the cosmos.
I assume you're referring to philosophy of mind issues. Physicalism can account for a good bit, but (as I've acknowledged) not everything. So what DOES explain the nonphysical aspects of mind? As I said, I'm interested in whatever theory is best explanation- in terms of explanatory scope, parsimony, and ad hoc-ness. I'm open to proposals for additional criteria. What metaphysical theory surpasses physicalism as a better explanation?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, it doesn't entail infinite regress. I'll refrain from guessing at what you're referring to, so please explain why you think this.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Seriously, it sounds like you don't understand physicalism. Law Realists suggest that laws are ontological relations between universals. Every instantiation of the relevant set of universals will necessarily instantiate the same effect.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Indeed, you don't have any idea. You are pontificating about something you know nothing about. I'm referring to truthmaker theory. A truthmaker is something that exists in the world, to which a true statement corresponds.
I'm making an effort to have a discussion that is reasonable and polite. You're making it difficult by making judgements based on your own lack of understanding. You COULD ask, instead of pontificating.
I was serious that I'm open hearing better theories, and particularly interested in understanding how you think we could actually learn something about the presumably nonphysical aspect of mind. Why have you not addressed this?
I agree. Most of mental life is better considered from completely different perspectives. My issue is specifically with ontology: what actually exists. I think ontology can be set aside for the issues you raised. If this is wrong, and there is such a dependency then there's a burden to make an epistemological case for that ontology.
Quoting Wayfarer
I suggest that the "philosophy of mind" issues that concern you could be dealt with without pinnning it to an ontology. This reminds me of your comments about teleology - which can be treated as a paradigm - an explanatory framework , not requiring an ontological commitment to teleology.
I doubt "consciousness studies" depends on a particular ontology of mind, because that would make it a house of cards.
I think it's unlikely that there are other intelligent life forms near enough to us, for them to impact us. But we clearly have different perspectives.
Sorry Relativist, I cannot disabuse you because the abuse is self-inflicted. You'll have to take up that task yourself.
"Evidence" is a loaded term. What qualifies as "evidence of X" for me does not necessarily qualify as "evidence of X" for you. This is because the proposed piece of evidence, Y, will either be considered as evidence of X, or not considered as evidence of X, depending on the apprehended relation between X and Y.
Accordingly, the evidence, Y, may be empirical, and the thing which it is evidence of, X, may be nonphysical. Therefore there is no need to assume that there cannot be "one bit of empirical evidence" for the nonphysical. For those who understand the relation between the physical and nonphysical, every physical thing is evidence of the nonphysical. And that is why the theologists commonly claim that each material thing is evidence of the immaterial God. But if you do not understand that relation between the physical and the nonphysical, you will not apprehend the physical as evidence of the nonphysical.
Now, once you get beyond that mental block, which is preventing you from seeing the physical as evidence of the nonphysical, then you can start to understand the reality of many different nonphysical things. And, one nonphysical aspect, A, will serve as evidence for another nonphysical aspect B. Under these circumstances, we can know something about the nonphysical aspect, B, without one bit of empirical evidence for that knowledge. The empirical evidence is for A, and A is nonphysical, but it is evidence of B. The relation between A and B, which allows A to qualify as evidence of B is also nonphysical, being a logical relation. Therefore we can know about B without one bit of empirical evidence for this knowledge.
Quoting Relativist
Well, unless it can account for every aspect of one thing, any one thing, absolutely, 100%, then it does not account for anything. It would only partially account for things. Since physicalism does not account for any one thing, in any absolute sense, then we can conclude that physicalism cannot account for anything. The best it can do is provide for a partial accounting. So, to have a complete account of anything, we need to include the nonphysical.
Quoting Relativist
Physicalist causation involves infinite regress, because each effect requires a previous cause. Then that cause requires a previous cause as well, ad infinitum. Therefore physicalism does not "account for causation", it simply takes causation for granted.
Quoting Relativist
A "universal" is nonphysical, as are the relations between universals.
Quoting Relativist
The relation between a statement and "the world" is nonphysical..
Quoting Relativist
I apologize for my attitude, but sometimes it's enjoyable to play the pontiff. You should try it sometime, you might enjoy it too, haha.
Quoting Relativist
I didn't answer, because I couldn't believe that someone could seriously be asking such a dimwitted question. Have you never tried introspection? Introspection is by definition, the examination of one's own mental and emotional processes. This is not a physical examination. Do you honestly believe that a person could learn absolutely nothing from such an examination?
Once again, I apologize for the attitude. However, I just cannot take you seriously when you ask questions like this. Then, you top it off with "I was serious that I'm open...". . That's the biggest piece of bullshit I've been hit with today. Your mind is closed tighter than a drum. You've locked yourself out, so that you cannot even get into your own mind. Oh my God! What can we do for you?
When we use the word ontology, its worth pausing to consider what the term actually means. The derivation is instructive. It comes from the Greek verb ???? to be. More specifically, from its present participle ??, ????? being. So ontology is not originally about compiling a list of things that happen to exist, but about inquiry into the nature of being as such. Ive sometimes put it informally as the study of I am-ness. Thats not strictly correct in grammatical terms, but it conveys something important about the distinction between philosophical ontology and the objective sciences.
Charles Kahns classic study The Greek Verb To Be and the Concept of Being (sent to me in respect of this very issue!) shows how the Greek verb 'to be' carries a rich set of nuances: copulative (x is y), existential (x is), and veridical (it is true that x). This polyvalence gave early philosophersfrom Parmenides to eon estin (being is) to Aristotles remark that being is said in many waysthe linguistic resources to elevate being itself into a philosophical concern.
Ontology, then, is not merely a massive catalogue of what exists. That is an ontic question, about beings and the nature and kinds of things that exist. Ontology, in its deeper sense, is about the nature of being itselfwhat it means to be, from the perspective of being (and we 'human beings'). And here the questions of ontology and epistemology are inevitably entangled: what it means to be cannot be separated from what it means to know. Nor can the question omit what kind of realness abstractanumbers, logical principles, universalsinstantiate. The physicalist insists that all of these ultimately depend on, or supervene upon, the physical; but the nature of that dependence is anything but obvious, and many of the physicalist explanations question-begging.
So yes, philosophy does have concerns that lie outside the domain of physics but those concerns are not derivative from physics. The idealist argument I maintain is that what is inevitably includes a subjective pole: what is real, is real for a subject, even when we imagine a universe devoid of observers, since that imaginative act is itself only performed by a subject.
Quoting Relativist
Well, you keep asking me for alternatives, it is a very fertile source for them. It's a cross-disciplinary subject matter embracing philosophy, science, neurobiology, and many other perspectives. Physicalism is represented but it is also challenged. It is by no means a single philosophy - that's the point!
Really, what you're saying, very politely is, 'hey, philosophers can worry about all these ethereal notions. It's the scientists who know what really is.' That is the zeitgeist.
Ontology is the general study of being, of what it means to be or to exist. Once the general characteristics shared by all beings are decided then what can be counted as a being can be
established.
With your etymological prescriptions you make it sound like it is a monolithic study in the sense that there could be only one way to think about it. However, you have an eccentric understanding of 'being' such that for you it applies only to living beings, whereas the most common meaning of 'to be' is simply 'to exist', and the most common meaning of 'to exist' is not 'to stand out for some percipient' but simply 'to be'.
And, contrary to what you claim, part of ontology does consist in deciding what all beings or existents have in common, and thus what kinds of things, and what particular things, can be said to exist. Yours is a tendentious and dogmatic, as opposed to an openminded, approach, unsurprisingly.
I did no such thing. Even the source I quoted said shows how the Greek verb 'to be' carries a rich set of nuances: copulative (x is y), existential (x is), and veridical (it is true that x). What I am saying, which is consistent with my general philosophy, which is that 'being' is something more than, or other than, the description of 'what exists', and that the term 'ontology' originally conveyed this meaning, even if it has changed over time.
I agree 'being' is not the description of "what exists" it is a noun referring to an existent or a verb referring to the act or fact of existing.
Anyway, you acknowledge that what ontology is considered to consist in may have changed over time, but the point is that it is the contemporary understanding, or range of understandings, of what ontology is concerned with that is important.
Why look back to the ancients when they did not have the immense benefit of our prodigious scientific knowledge and understanding? Ontological enquiry should be about what it is reasonable to think about being today, not two thousand years ago.
Can any of the physical-chemical sciences explain the intentionality of consciousness or explain what a noema is better than phenomenology? Or the Pythagorean theorem better than geometry? Or what a universal better than philosophy? Or what is beauty better than aesthetics? Or what is a correct argument better than logic? Or how prices functions better than economy? Or what is a morphema better than linguistics?
For me, there are several categories in the world that are irreducible to one another.
I agree with you. But physicalism cant really allow ontological differences as it is monistic, right? There is only one kind of fundamental substance, and it is the subject matter of physics. Everything else is derived from that.
I believe the issue which Wayfarer is trying to bring to our attention, is that there is a specific type of characteristic of being, which is only provided by the first person perspective, I, or myself. Since this is a real characteristic of the being which I call "myself" we need to determine whether it is a characteristic of all beings before we can make any conclusive judgement about "the general characteristics of all beings".
Quoting Janus
That is a mistaken approach. The predication is made of a subject, and the subject need not exist. It might be imaginary, a possibility, or a misapprehension. Until we determine what it means to exist, we cannot take existence of anything for granted.
Quoting Janus
I believe, the relevant point is that many ancient philosophers practised introspection, and had very good understanding of the first person perspective of being. Scientific knowledge is based in empirical observation, and does not include that first person perspective, which is sometimes called "subjective".
To be clear, a being only has direct, immediate access to the internal composition of any being, through itself. Any other attempt to access the internal composition of a being is always mediated, either by dividing a being, to see its internal parts (in which case we lose the principle of unity), or through the use of some tool (in which case the tool contaminates the observation). The only way to truly observe the internal aspects of any being directly and immediately, is through self introspection, which is "subjective". Therefore subjective knowledge is a very valuable part of the knowledge of being.
Since it is necessary to consider this first person perspective, subjective knowledge, before making any conclusive judgements about "the general characteristics of all beings", we need to look beyond scientific knowledge and understanding. This is not to say that we ought to exclude scientific knowledge, but that it is necessary to consider other knowledge beyond scientific knowledge. In doing so we look for the best sources, and these tend to be those which have stood the test of time, ancient sources which have been tried and accepted in practise, and which remain relevant today.
Thats close to what I mean. But its also an observation about the peculiarity of the modern sense of existence. David Loy, independent Buddhist scholar, says The main problem with our usual understanding of [secular culture] is that it is taken-for-granted, so we are not aware that it is a worldview. It is an ideology that pretends to be the everyday world we live in. Most of us assume that it is simply the way the world really is, once superstitious beliefs about it have been removed.
When Heidegger speaks of the forgetfulness of Being (Seinsvergessenheit), he means that Western philosophy since Plato has tended to think only in terms of beings (entities, things) and not Being itself the more fundamental horizon that makes beings intelligible in the first place. This forgetfulness leads to the modern picture of the world as divided into subjects (thinking selves) and objects (things out there). That is, the human being is conceived as an isolated subject standing over against an objective realm of things (what David Loy says we take to be the world as it really is).
Heideggers solution to that is Dasein literally being-there. Rather than beginning from an isolated consciousness, Heidegger insists that we are always already Being-in-the-world. Our existence is not something added on top of a neutral subject, but a fundamental openness to, and involvement with, the world. In this sense, human beings are never separate from their world; they are inextricably bound up with it. This is why Heidegger criticises the subjectobject schema as a distortion inherited from the Cartesian picture.
I mention it, because it is an insight into the original concerns of ontology.
Yes. But we must keep in mind that physicalists have chosen a couple of sciences (in this case, physics and chemistry) from which they seek to derive, reduce, or explain everything else. We must be very attentive to how things are derived and ask ourselves if there really is a valid explanation and reduction of the world to specific categories and concepts from specific sciences.
I believe that this cannot be done without losing the operability of the other sciences (or disciplines) that describe the world. Imagine that in mathematics there is a reduction to physics and you have concepts of speed, time, energy, mass, etc., and you have to use them to develop Pythagoras' theorem. You can't!
Chemistry provides a more useful explanation of interactions between atoms and molecules associated with chemical bonds than does quantum field theory. Biology provides the more useful accounts of physiology and disease than quantum chemistry. In all these cases, this does not imply that these sciences are not, in fact, reducible to fundamental physics.
When I've said that (IMO) physicalism is the "best explanation", this is in comparison to other complete metaphysical theories. Physicalism is the theory that all existing things are grounded in physical nature.
I'll address some of the issues you raised.
An intention is a disposition to behave in some general or specific way. It reflects some mediation between stimuli and response.
I think "noema" equate to "mental object". I'd just deny that they are objects (ontological). They reflect a component of thinking, a general or specific pattern (neural networks are adept at pattern recognition), often associated with a memory (e.g. a visual memory).
I don't think you fully understand what a reduction means. What do you understand by reduction in any case?
i would characterize this "usual understanding" as the lazy way. It's "the lazy way" because superstitious beliefs, spirituality, and even the freedom of choice, all relate to the extremely difficult aspects of reality to understand. The common, or usual understanding, of reality, will remove these as either unreal or irrelevant. This means that the most difficult aspects of reality to understand, are simply ignored by the common or usual way of understanding, producing "the lazy way".
Quoting Relativist
This is not an accurate explanation of "intention". Intention produces completely novel things. Therefore it is not an inclination in a general or specific way, but an inclination toward a particular act. And, since the intentional act is toward something completely new, it cannot be said to be a mediation between stimuli and response. It produces a new thing. If it is to be described as a mediation, it is the mediation between the agent and the act. The agent being free to act in a multitude of ways, will act in a particular way, and intention is what produces the particular way which is produced, rather than another way.
Reductive physicalism implies that complex (or higher level) objects are composed of simpler (lower level) objects, and ultimately reducible to whatever is fundamental. Non-reductive physicalism entails the notion that novel properties ontologically emerge in higher level structures.
That's it's domain, and it is only falsified by identifying some existing thing that doesn't fit the model.
Quoting Wayfarer
Of course! Physicalism does not subsume or supplant all of philosophy, or even all of science. Analogously, it would be absurd for a viticulturist to try and predict the composition of phenolic compounds that result in certain flavors or textures in wine, using quantum field theory.
Even if some useful/meaningful philosophical paradigm is inconsistent with physicalism, it doesn't automatically falsify physicalism. Falsifying it on the basis of paradigm inconsistency would be at least as complex as it would be for a physicalist to try and give a physicalist account of the issue.
Again, I have acknowleged that there are good reasons to believe there is something non-physical about mental activity. You have also acknowledged that there is something physical about mental activity. It seems pointless to debate what portions of the gray area are more, or less, likely to point to something non-physical.
Non-reductive physicalism tries to close this gap with emergence. But that makes the view unfalsifiable, since any anomaly can simply be reclassified as emergent.
So the tension is this: either physicalism covers all that is real, in which case philosophy reduces to physics; or else philosophy genuinely addresses irreducible realities, in which case physicalism does not cover everything that is real. Which is it?
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Then clearly it is illogical for you to believe that physicalism is the best ontology. You are logically inconsistent because you define physicalism as "the theory that everything that exists, is composed of physical things, and that they act and assemble entirely due to physical forces due to laws of nature". Then you say "there are good reasons to believe there is something non-physical about mental activity". Obviously, you have good reasons to reject physicalism, yet you do not. Why not just reject physicalism and get it over with? Why not move along to better ontologies which recognize the "good reasons to believe there is something non-physical about mental activity."
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I generally prefer to use "evidence" in the broadest sense: data (excluding nothing). I specifically referred to empirical evidence (data that is obtained by observation). Here, we're dealing with metaphysical "theories", which (I suggest) are best thought of as explanatory hypotheses for the data. The "data" consists of all the uncontroversial facts of the world. The explanatory hypotheses would be the various metaphysical "theories" that endeavor to account for all these facts.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This presupposes that something nonphysical exists. That is hypothesis, not an uncontroversial fact. There are metaphysical theories that assume this, but it's nevertheless a controversial assumption (there are clearly professional philosophers who deny this). That's why I stress that it is the uncontroversial facts of the world that need to be best accounted for.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You should publish a paper that proves there are non-physical objects, so that the physicalist philosophers can learn the errors of their ways and start working on something productive. According to a survey of professional philosophers, over half of them "accept or lean toward" physicalism (source). I'm not suggesting truth is derived by majority vote, but rather that you might want to reconsider your arrogant view that only someone with a "mental block" would deny the existence of non-physical objects.
Or...there is an uncaused initial, foundational state of affairs that exists by brute fact. This seems to me the preferable alternative to a vicious infinite regress, irrespective of whether or not physicalism is true. My personal theory is that the uncaused, initial state exists out of metaphysical necessity - but this depends no one beliefs about ontological contingency.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Non-sequitur. Suppose we take as a premise that there exists something nonphysical. That does not imply that every existing is (at least) partly nonphysical. We only need to account for the things (and their properties) that we know (i.e. have strong reasons to believe) exist.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You are obviously unfamiliar with the concept of immanent universals. Example of this view: a 45 degree angle does not have some independent existence; rather, it exists in its instantiations. It reflects a specific physical relation between two objects.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It is not an ontological relation; it is semantics: the definition of "truth" expressed as a pseudo-relation between a statement and some aspect of reality.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You have demonstrated that your arrogance is rooted in ignorance - you seemed unaware that there are views that differ from your own, that respected philosophers hold to - not just "dimwits" like me. On the other hand, you've mentioned nothing that I wasn't already aware of.
For me "forgetfulness of being" is not an intellectual oversight, but a failure to live to the fullest due to being distracted by various kinds of preoccupations. Consumerism is a big one?so I see materialism in that sense as the "enemy", but I don't see materialism as a metaphysical position as detrimental at all, unless it be considered that all such intellectual preoccupations distract us from living to the fullest.
And I don't think it is the case that such intellectual pursuits (provided they don't become unhealthy preoccupations) need detract from a life lived to the fullest.
The mere struggle to survive can be an all-consuming distraction. I wonder how the ancient peasants?those lacking any intellectual education?lived. Did they live fuller lives than we do today? And how many people today are preoccupied with working out the best metaphysics? Do all, or even most, or even many, people have a propensity to be driven by intellectual concerns? Are there more such people (as a percentage of the population) today than there were three thousand, two thousand, one thousand or five hundred years ago?
What could "forgetfulness of being" even mean to those who lack an intellectual interest?
Quoting Relativist
I asked you before, and you gave no answer, as to what good reasons there are to think there is something non-physical about mental activity? Presuming that you have in mind something other than the obvious notion that "abstractions, concepts, generalities and logic are not physical".
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It seems obvious that all percipients have some kind of "first person perspective", so of course beings can be classed as living and non-living, sentient and non-sentient, and even sapient and non-sapient. None of that has been forgotten or is even controversial, though.
Animals arguably live with more presence than we do?our symbolic language has enabled us to become caught up in all kinds of "mind-distractions", and that is what i would say is "forgetfulness of being". And there are all kinds of other pursuits which can become unhealthy preoccupations. That is not to say I think an intellectual pursuit, or any other kind of pursuit, necessarily leads to forgetfulness of being.
The simplest definition of reductionism is this:
If x reduces to y, then it can in a relevantly strong sense be explained in terms of y.
--source
Example: chemical reactions can (in principle) be explained in terms of fundamental physics. Chemistry is concerned mainly with the structure and reactions of atoms and molecules. These structures and reactions are a consequence of the properties of their components. The study of those components, and their properties, is fundamental physics. I doubt that anyone suggests there's some ontological emergence occurring when molecules interact that is not due to the properties of the components (as studied by physics). This relationship can be described as "Chemistry is reducible to Physics". This relationship between chemistry and physics is uncontroversial.
Is Biology reducible to Chemistry and Physics? No behavior has been observed that is inconsistent with either of these disciplines, so this is a reason to believe it to be reducible. An alternative would be ontological emergence: that novel properties emerge in higher level structures, properties that are not a consequence of the properties of the constituent parts. It seems to me the basis for believing in ontological emergence is weak, but I'll leave it at that because this seems sufficient to describe what I mean by reductionism.
Sorry I overlooked your question. This was the issue that Wayfarer and I were discussing, so I (erroneously) took it for granted.
The "good reason" to believe there is something nonphysical involved is simply that set of issues that is referred to as the "hard problem of consciousness": fully accounting for all aspects of our subjective experience of consciousness. For example: how do feelings of hunger and pain, arise from the firing of neurons, or accounting for the perceived quality of some specific color.
As a computer guy, I also think about these things in terms of whether or not a machine could be programmed to exhibit the same qualities that our minds exhibit. I'm stumped, and it seems that most physicalist philosophers are, as well.
This does not prove physicalism is false - that would entail an argument from ignorance. It could very well be that in the future, these issues will be resolved - and we'll be able to construct robots that have subjective experiences of qualia. But arguments from ignorance can often be cast as inferences to the best explanation, and I think one could argue that the hard problem is better explained by assuming some non-physical aspect is required. That's what I'm calling the "good reasons".
By "outside the domain of physics", I was referring to Physics as a discipline, with a scope of study and research. As I've mentioned several times, Chemists do not directly utilize quantum field theory to do their work, even though this is theoretically possible. They utilize known properties of chemical reactions - aspects of their discipline. That this is done does not imply that chemistry is not reducible to physics
Agreed, but so is the notion that there is something nonphysical involved with mental activities. This is the problem with many theories in philosophy, and it's why I suggest that the only reasonable option is to strive for an inference to best explanation (albeit that this will necessarily entail subjectivity).
Sure, physicalism implies philosophy is reducible to physics IN PRINCIPLE, but it seems to me that this would be computationally too complex - to the point of being physically impossible.
I'll again refer to the Chemistry-Physics reduction: it's absurdly impractical to do Chemistry on the computational basis of fundamental physics. Biology would be many orders of magnitude more complex. Philosophy would be still more complex.
But isn't it very simple to show that there is 'something nonphysical' involved in, for example, mathematics and rational inference (at the very least) ? You've already said that computers and calculators, which are physical devices, can perform these operations, to which the reply is, these are artifacts made by humans who already understand these subjects. They're not naturally occurring or self-assembling. And furthermore that these kinds of mental activites comprise the relations of ideas - 'if x is the case, then y must also be the case.' How can such operations be understood as physical? The analogy you give of chemistry is 'that chemistry has to be understood in its own right, but that doesn't mean it's not ultimately reducible to physics'. So why doesn't the same apply here?
It's the very fact that logical, mathematical and syntactical operations can be replicated by machines, and also represented in different media types or symbolic forms, that is itself an argument against physicalism. Why? Because it shows that the content of these operations - the symbolic form, what it is that is being described or depicted - is separable from the physical form in which it is encoded.
And you concede that any explanation will entail subjectivity (which I agree with). But this also undercuts Armstrong's style of materialism, for whom the mind independence of the physical is an axiom.
Quoting Relativist
Right. So where does Armstrongs materialist theory of mind stand in relation to this? If physicalism is only in principle and never in practice because the domains of logic, mathematics, and meaning cant actually be reduced then isnt his theory less an account of mind than an aspiration that everything ought to be reducible to the physical?
I think that the underlying aim is to declare that only the objects of the physical sciences can be said to exist - this is why you refer to the ontological side of the debate. But I think this view is very much anchored in the Galilean picture in which the subject and object are strictly divided, and the measurable attributes of objects are considered primary, while everything else must be derived from that. Science not only provides the paradigm but also the content - hence the ontology. But i think this has been very much undermined by 20th century physics in both science and philosophy.
Okay thanks for explaining. I have a different take than you on this it seems. I think that conceiving the character of conscious experience in terms of "quales" is wrong-headed and based on "folk psychology".
As I asked a poster in another thread 'is there a difference between consciousness and being conscious?'. How could perceptions, functions of evolved sensory organs and neural structures, that reveal environments and open up the possibility of responding to signs from those environments, be effective if they were not experienced and carried no qualitative significance?
I think the sense and idea of being conscious has been reified into 'consciousness as real and non-physical', and that this reification is a natural artefact of our dualistic symbolic language. Mind, instead of being understood verbally as "minding", as an activity or process of a sentient physical being, has been hypostatized as a noun, and even considered to be an entirely separate substance.
Since we, as linguistically mediated beings with a sense of freedom of action, consider our thoughts, feelings and behavior in terms of responding to reasons rather than being causally forced, and since this seems natural, we develop an intuition that this characteristic shows that we are not merely physical beings, and I think this intuition is misleading. Also since we are so complex, understanding our behavior in terms of physics, although not impossible, would be such a laborious and counter-intuitive task that it is practically unfeasible.
But I don't think this unfeasibility lends any support to the idea that there is anything substantive in us beyond our physical natures. Anti-physicalist proponents will argue that mind is not a substance but that it is real and different from the physical nonetheless. The problem is that then they cannot say anything at all about what it purportedly is if not a separated substance?that is just how it could be real other than as an activity or process of a physical nature.
Of course I could be wrong, so this is just my own take on it. The problem is that it is not a question the answer to which can be empirically or logically demonstrated, and all things considered, it doesn't seem to be very important either, even if it is kind of fun to consider.
If you are acquainted with skepticism, you'll understand that there is no such thing as uncontroversial facts of the world. So this proposal is a nonstarter.
Quoting Relativist
The point though, is that it answers your challenge, how we could possibly know something nonphysical when there is no empirical evidence for it.
In case you didn't understand, here's an example. Suppose piece of knowledge A is "2+2=4". For the sake of argument, this is taken to be something nonphysical. There is much empirical evidence for this, all we need to do is take two things and bring another two, and see that this makes four. Now, by applying nonphysical principles of logic, we can conclude piece of knowledge B, "2,000,000,000,000+2,000,000,000,000=4,000,000,000,000". At this point, it is not necessary that we put together 4,000,000,000,000 things, or even 2,000,000,000,000 things, we can know this thing B, without any empirical evidence of it.
So we can know B without any empirical evidence of B. If B is something nonphysical, that is an example of how we could know something which is nonphysical, when there is no empirical evidence for it. This is actually very common in mathematics, and in fact it is why applied math is so useful. With the application of mathematics, we can know many things without any empirical evidence of these things. Basically that is how successful prediction works. We know that things will occur, before there is any empirical evidence of the thing which will occur. You might prefer to call this magic, but it's really just the nonphysical in action. When we describe an event which has not yet occurred, isn't it accurate to describe this event as having no physical existence, i.e. nonphysical?
Quoting Relativist
Actually there is a lot of such material already published, so no need for me to do that. The problem is that physicalists tend to be very closed minded, and don't bother studying, and learning, the things which disprove their physicalist beliefs.
Quoting Relativist
It's not a non-sequitur. The point is that physicalism cannot account for anything in completion. To "account" for a thing requires a complete description. If you cannot describe every aspect of the thing, you have not accounted for the thing. Otherwise "accounting for" would be completely subjective, and an arbitrary description of whatever aspect of the thing which one feels like describing.
The simple fact is that the human sensory system is somewhat deficient. The senses miss some aspects of everything. This means that empirical principles cannot provide for us a complete understanding.
Quoting Relativist
"45 degree angle" is a geometrical description. Yes, it is true that "It reflects a specific physical relation between two objects", but "reflects" does not mean "is". Therefore your supposed "account" provides no information about what "a 45 degree angle" actually is, just an account of what it reflects. Nice try Einstein.
Quoting Relativist
Yes, semantics is meaning, and meaning is nonphysical. Therefore, as I said, the relation is nonphysical.
Quoting Relativist
I am fully aware that there are views which differ from my own. Many of which are ridiculous. Most forms of physicalism fall into that category. I'm still waiting for you to produce something reasonable, in your claim of a view that differs from my own. Until you produce something reasonable, I'll continue to classify yours as ridiculous.
Quoting Janus
Sure, we can propose a division between living and not living. But, by what principle do you propose that both are properly called "beings"? I believe that is the issue. What does "being" mean to you, and is it proper to call the moon a being?
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I agree with that, and I think this is very much the consequence of Cartesian dualism with its 'res cogitans'. That is literally translated as a 'thinking thing' ('res' being the Latin term for 'thing'). It is oxymoronic from the beginning, and one of the reasons we have been left with a worldview within which only the physical (res extensa) is understood to be real. This is very much the background of this whole debate.
Quoting Janus
That is why it is important to differentiate 'what is real' from 'what exists'. 'What exists' is the legitimate object of scientific analysis. But due to the constitution of post-Galilean science, this excludes the subject for whom the object is real, as a matter of principle. (This is what has been called into question by 20th century physics due to the 'observer problem.)
Another way to think of 'mind' is in terms of the Aristotelian 'nous'. This is the basis of his form-matter dualism, a very different beast to Descartes' dualism. in this philosophy, nous is what perceives the forms (intelligible principles) of individual particulars. 'In the Aristotelian scheme, nous is the basic understanding or awareness that allows human beings to think rationally. For Aristotle, this was distinct from the processing of sensory perception, including the use of imagination and memory, which other animals can do. For Aristotle, discussion of nous is connected to discussion of how the human mind sets definitions in a consistent and communicable way' - which is the basis of the discussion of universals' (source). But notice this is also much more commensurable with 'mind as activity' rather than as 'substance'.
So the 'rational intellect' is able to grasp what has been called 'intelligible objects' - although this term is also problematical, as numbers, laws, conventions, and the like, are not really objects except for in the metaphorical sense as 'objects of thought' or 'the object of the exercise'. From there, you can see how Kant recasts Aristotles insight: what Aristotle called nous, Kant reframed as the a priori categories of understanding.
So the mind is 'real and different from the physical' not as a kind of ghost in the machine, but as the medium through which and for which the whole conception of 'object' is meaningful.
I'm not a believer in properness, but rather in consistency and coherency. We humans are so humancentric that we tend to think of human being as the paradigm. We don't use the term 'animal being' so much but simply 'animal'.
Of course 'being' gets extended to 'living being', and 'sentient being' and perhaps it has become more uncommon to speak of non-living or non-sentient beings. But since such entities are existents and to exist seems to be synonymous with 'to be' I see no inconsistency in referring to the moon as a being.
If we have all the appropriate conceptual distinctions is it really all that important what words we use to frame them?
It seems the nub of our disagreement is that I think of minding as being a real physical (that is embodied, neural) activity and for me 'to exist' and 'to be real' are the same (and I think this reflects the most common usages). Perhaps the difference lies merely in choice of terminology.
On further reflection though, I want to add that, for example, it might be said that Bilbo exists as a fictional character, but that since he is fictional, he is not real. This seems to introduce a wrinkle in the tidy fabric, and shows that these terms are more elastic than is often allowed.
I am not referring to the physical/ chemical sciences, which are indeed reducible to each other. I am referring to the vast array of sciences and disciplines that we possess and which, nevertheless, are not reducible to the physical and chemical sciences. I have mentioned some of them, such as phenomenology, mathematics/geometry, logic, psychology, economics, aesthetics, etc.
Reduction would take place if we used, for example, the terms and concepts of physics to derive and explain laws, correlations, principles, theorems and so on from other sciences such as those I have mentioned.
This cannot be done. For example, you have concepts of speed, time, energy, mass, etc., and you have to use them to develop Pythagoras' theorem. It cannot be done. Therefore, there is no reduction. And physicalism has no place in science as a set of sciences. It could be said that physicalism is anti-scientific in this sense, since it does not respect the identity of many sciences and disciplines.
Now, you could argue that your intention is not to carry out that reduction but to establish that the properties of the world described by other sciences are emergent properties. But then emergence is not explanatory, and physicalism has no explanatory power. And if it has no explanatory power, then I don't know why anyone would choose physicalism as a general ontology of the world.
Properness is a requirement for consistency and coherency. Ambiguity produces equivocation. So if you really believed in consistency and coherency, you'd believe in grammar as well.
Quoting Janus
Yes, obviously it is all that important. If we don't use the words required to frame the conceptual distinctions, having the distinctions is pointless. You can say for example, 'I can easily distinguish between a rock and a human being', but if you just always refer to them both as "beings", what good does your ability to distinguish serve?
Quoting Janus
It's generally not productive to say that two words are synonymous. This dissolves the difference between them making the choice of using one or the other insignificant, despite the fact that there is at least nuanced differences between all words.
The most common difference between two words which might appear to be synonymous, is a difference of category. Sometimes one word will define the other, and actually signify a broader category, while the inverse cannot be the case. This allows that there are others in that broader category, making the words not synonymous. For example, "man" and "human being", might at first glance appear synonymous. However, we know that "human being" is actually the defining term for "man", as the broader category, because "man" properly refers to the male members of the category, and there are also female members.
Since "being" is most often defined by existing, and "existing" is usually defined by something further, we ought to consider that "existing" is the broader term. This would imply that all beings are existing, but not all existents are beings, because "existent" could include things which are not beings. Subtle distinctions allow us to keep our categories clear, and categories are conducive to deductive reasoning.
You have it arse-about. We only know that something is a "proper" expression if it is consistent and coherent. The latter are the criteria for the former, not vice versa. If there are sveral consietnt and coherent usages of a term . then there would not be just one "proper" usage.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, but again there may be more than one way to frame the distinctions, and of course if they are not framed consistently and coherently then they are not really framed at all, and we could not be said to "have" the distinctions.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The nuances of words vary with the different associations different people have of them, which is reflected in the different usages. You might not like a particular usage, but that would just be your personal preference and does not preclude the usage being perfectly consistent and coherent with common usage.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I disagree?I think that words can be synonymous within one context and not within another. In most general usage in English I think that to say that something is is to say that it exists, and to say that something exists is consistent with saying that it is be-ing (as a verb) or a being (as a noun).
But whatever you say, someone will disagree. For example I might say 'love is' meaning that there is love. Then if I say 'love exists', also meaning that there is love, someone will objects that love is not an existent object. I might then say, in accordance with a common usage "love is a thing"., and then the objection will be that love is not an object. And yet we say things (see what I did there) like "the thing is...".
You are never going to get away from the ambiguities of language, and playing though police or speech police is an unreasonable and unhelpful move. Wisdom is not to be found in teasing out some supposedly pure and perfect usage.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What about "the most important thing is love" and "love being the most important thing". Love is being practiced every day. Love exists in the world? You know perfectly well what I'm saying there even thought the words used might not be consistent with your preferences.
You are not going to get everyone to share your preferences, because as I said earlier language is elastic and we all encounter differences emphases on "correct" usage as we grow up and throughout our lives.
In philosophy, as I see it, it's more important to focus on the consistency, coherency and plausibility of arguments than pedantically worrying about "proper" usage of terms. Whatever is serviceable for getting the ideas across will do.
I don't believe there is any hidden knowledge, to be found in word usage, there is just the knowledge of different usages in different contexts to be found.
I accurately described what is meant by reductionism. It is a hypothesis in philosophy of science that an idealized, 100% correct, fundamental physics accounts for all things that exist, and how they interact and behave.
It does not entail a discipline-to-disciple translation recipe. The scientific disciplines you refer to are based on fit-for-purpose paradigms, and none are complete or perfect.
Do you acknowledge that everything in the physical world is composed of the same set of fundamental particles? The current best guess is the well-supported standard model of particle physics. The standard model accounts for the both the composition of matter, and the forces that result in their behavior. It accounts for everything known to exist in the universe, except possibly dark matter and dark energy. But it does account for everything that exists on earth: all objects are made of atoms; atoms are made of quarks and electrons. No exceptions. So clearly, the composition of everything on earth is reducible to these particles.
In light of this. what do you think would make reductionism false? You mentioned speed, time, energy, mass. The nature of time is controversial in both science and metaphysics, but speed, energy, and mass are accounted for in the physics behind the standard model: quantum field theory. While the nature of time is controversial, whatever it is doesn't have bearing on reductionism - because whatever it IS, is the same for everything- no reduction is needed.
And numbers.
I am a little disappointed with your response. You have simply reiterated what you already said, reaffirming your position but without providing any arguments against what I said.
In terms of composition, things do not improve. Imagine saying that the number pi is made up of hydrogen atoms. Or that the idea of justice is made up of the same atoms. These are categorical errors. If you talk about composition, you must necessarily talk about decomposition, and if we decompose the number pi and the idea of justice, we do not have atoms, we have more numbers (or ratios, circumferences and diameters) and more ideas (an idea is composed by more ideas).
It is said that a reduction by composition fails when the path of decomposition fails and we do not have the components we thought we had in the first place. This happens with most of the knowledge we have (the entire set of sciences and disciplines). Ethical principles cannot be broken down into atoms without losing all the meaning of what a principle means. Hence, physicalism by composition is also erroneous.
Even physics is not entirely physics. Do not forget the mathematical part that composes it and gives it its scientific and exact status. And that is despite the fact that mathematics is supposed to be a higher level in terms of composition. So it would have to be said that the universe has an ideal-objective aspect (Plato's realm) - (or ideal-subjective if you think mathematics is all mental, that will be funny, to think the universe with mental properties), as does mathematics. In that sense, it must be said that physicalism by composition is false even in the case of the universe.
That is demonstrably incorrect Janus. And this is why you need to keep your categories clear, and ensure that you understand the broader category, being the defining feature of the narrower, as necessary for, therefore prior to, the narrower. In Aristotelian terms, the broader category, as the defining feature, is "within" the narrower. So for example, "animal" is within "human being" as a defining feature. This means that if it is a human being, it is necessarily an animal, but not vise versa because "human being" is not within "animal" as a defining feature. So "animal" is logically prior to "human being", meaning that "animal" can be understood independently from "human being", but "human being" cannot be understood independently from "animal". Animal is an essential, necessary, aspect of the concept human being while human being is contingent on animal.
In the case of your statement above, "proper" is the broader category from the narrower "logically coherent", or "logically consistent". "Proper" is a defining, essential feature, of "logically coherent". To be logically coherent, properness is necessary. So "proper" is logically prior to, as necessary for logical coherency. On the other hand, "proper", being the broader category, affords all different types of properness, which do not necessarily involve logical coherency. So we have many different types of social norms, mores and morals, rules and regulations, which describe different types of properness, and we can place "logical forms" as one type of properness. If we follow those specific rules of logical properness, we have logical coherency. So properness is clearly prior to logically coherent, as necessary for logical coherence. But logical coherence is not necessary for properness as there are other forms of properness. In relation to each other then, properness is independent from, but necessary for logically coherent, while logically coherent is contingent, as dependent on properness.
Therefore the exact contrary of what you say here is what is really the case. Since there are many forms of properness, a "proper expression" does not require logical consistency or coherency. It may be "proper" in the sense of following a moral principle, or some other form of correctness, properness being determined by that context. On the other hand, a statement must be proper in the sense of following logical rules, for it to be judged as logically consistent, or coherent. Therefore, contrary to what you say, we know that the statement is consistent and coherent, by judging it to be proper. That is, we refer to that specific type of properness, found in logical forms, and if the statement conforms to that type of properness, we judge it as consistent and coherent.
Quoting Janus
This makes no sense at all. It is impossible that two words appear in the very same context. the person would be using both words at the same time. Instead, the person must chose one word or the other. And if one word is chosen over the other because it has different meaning from the other, in a different context, then that difference carries into the new context, by the very fact that it was chosen for that reason.
I addressed your issue in a reply to Janus:
Quoting Relativist
The "good reasons" are not established facts that falsify physicalism, as you seem to be implying. Rather they are reasonable possibilities that SOME might consider strong enough to sway their own abductive analysis (choosing a metaphysical theory that best explains all available uncontroversial facts). I still judge physicalism the best overall metaphysical theory that I've seen.
I do not take the objections of extreme skeptics seriously.
If one considers there to be no uncontroversial facts, then one has no basis for selecting a metaphysical theory. I'm an epistemological pragmatist.
It seems I'd never considered that phrase before.
Google's AI overview was very close to my intuitive notion of what is suggested by the phrase. Is there a definition you particularly like?
Quoting Wayfarer
There are 2 related and relevant aspects of mathematics:
1. The portion that is grounded in the actual world. This includes things like numericity: two-ness, three-ness, four-ness... each is a physical property that is held by certain groups of objects. By applying the "way of abstraction" we discern the natural numbers as abstractions of these physical properties. We then notice various relations between numbers and establish basic arithmetic.
2. Axioms: statements we make to define an abstract mathematical system, and from which we draw inferences using logic.
Rational inference may be epistemologically grounded in cause and effect (observed pattern): If x occurs then y will happen. Then extended by semantics and abstraction. Formal logic is clearly nothing more than semantics: precise meanings attached to words (e.g. "and", "or", "not", "if...then..."). The precise meanings are typically defined in truth tables.
Quoting Wayfarer
My point is that any behavior that can be described algorithmically is consistent with the behavior of something physical- hence it's consistent with physicalism.
Quoting Wayfarer
You seem to be bundling the easy and hard problems of consciousness together. Easy: Machines can identify patterns, and could utilize those patterns in new ways. Attaching meaning to words or patterns is even straightforward (to a point): words represent memories (learnings, experiences).
The hard part pertains specifically to the elements of consciousness that we can't even envision a means of duplicating in a machine: qualia. This includes the minor thrill of completing a task, the sense memories we attach to words; the way we perceive things.
Example: "red" can be defined to a computer as a range of wavelengths, but we know red as the memory of a particular sensory experience.
Quoting Wayfarer
To put it simply (and a little imprecisely): "In principle" is a way of expressing the metaphysical claim that everything is composed of the same set of particles, that in each case they have achieved their arrangement as a consequence of laws of nature, and that every action taken by these complex objects is also entirely due to these laws of nature.
The "in practice" problem: we don't have a perfect physics, and even if we did, it would be computationally impossible to describe the behavior of complex objects using only the computstional methodology of fundamental physics. That's all it means. It does not mean it's impossibly difficult for the fundamental particles and forces to do what they do (which is what I think you may be inferring). Analogously: consider the effort needed to calculate the position the moon from a point on earth at some specific time vs the moon simply behaving per gravity.
Quoting Wayfarer
That's close, but you word it in a way that sounds like it is excluding something. Rather, it's a parsimonious view of what exists: it's unparsimonious to believe things exist that can't be detected or observed to exist + the observation that everything that is observed or inferred to exist is physical.
Consider the early universe: what we know about it is inferred; there is no basis to infer anything existing other than the physical objects we've inferred to have existed.
Quoting Wayfarer
No. We believe our senses: that the objects we perceive actually do exist. We believe reliable sources, such as historians, archaeologists, and parents who tell us about what existed in the past. Science happens to give us a means to infer additional existents, but any reliable means would be fine.
No, that's not at all what I am implying.
I am wondering why you think physicalism, which holds that all is physical, is the best ontology, when you also see good reason to believe that there is something nonphysical. Your beliefs seem self-contradictory to me.
Here's an example for comparison. You believe that all the problems of the world will be resolved. But you also see good reason to believe that some problems will never be solved. How can you hold these two beliefs at the same time?
It is in no way 'a physical property'. One can count the members of a set of concepts, none of which is physical. Counting is an intellectual act which can be applied to both physical and non-physical entities.
Quoting Relativist
But the issue is, can insight be described algorithmically?
Quoting Relativist
Thanks for clarifying. But notice what youve said: the in principle part of physicalism is a metaphysical claim that all things are ultimately just arrangements of particles under natural laws. Thats not a finding of science but a philosophical commitment hiding behind the skirts of science.
The in practice problem (computational impossibility) doesnt really address the deeper issue I raised. With the moon, the problem is only one of calculation we know what it is to be a moon, and the math just gets messy. But with mind, the issue is different: truths, meanings, logical relations, and intentions are not computationally intractable physical behaviors. They are not physical categories at all. And furthermore, Albert Einstein had good reason for asking the rhetorical question 'does the moon continue to exist when nobody is looking at it.' Do you appreciate why he would ask that question?
So I come back to Armstrong: if physicalism is only in principle, then his theory remains more an aspiration than an account. It assumes that what is mental must be reducible, even though what makes the mental what it is (logic, normativity, meaning) has never been captured in physical terms, and in fact we rely on logic to ascertain what physical means.
Quoting Relativist
There is something very obvious that it excludes, as I've already said time and again. And you don't notice or acknowledge what it is - you basically gloss over it or ignore it. And what is that 'something'? Why, it is the subject to whom a theory is meaningful, the mind that provides the definitions and draws the conclusions.
And this 'ignoring' is constitutional to materialist philosophy. Why? Because, as I'm sure I've already said, it is built into Galilean science, which divides the world into objective (primary) and subjective (secondary) attributes. It then tries to explain everything in terms of those primary attributes- which is the essence of materialism - including the very subject who is doing the explaining. This is the subject of an essay an Aeon, which has now become a book, called 'The Blind Spot of Science is the Neglect of Lived Experience', which spells out this same criticism.
So what your philosophy leaves out is actually the human being. That is what is not included in the account - which you then try and retroactively construct on the basis of a science from which it has been methodically excluded from the outset. So much so, that you no longer can notice that you don't notice it. Hence, a blind spot.
I'm being consistent, and pragmatic.
Remember I'm making an inference to best explanation (IBE), and that requires taking all information into account. If all else were equal in the analysis of theories, and there were a tie, then this issue would tip the scale. That makes it a "good reason": it's relevant and worthy of consideration.* But this issue is just one factor in my overall IBE exercise, and I judge it insufficient to counter all the virtues of physicalism.
I am also pragmatic. The "good reasons" indeed give me reason to have some doubt about physicalism, but I have a pragmatic epistemology: practically nothing is certain, and there's always some reason to doubt one's beliefs - but it's impractical to withhold judgement on everything that is possibly false. IMO, most of our rational beliefs are the product of (at least rudimentary) IBE, and it would be intellectually crippling to try and muddle through life while withholding judgement on everything that could possibly be false.
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* an example something not worthy of consideration would be allegations of miracles.
I think your judgement is unreasonable then. Since you have "good reasons" to believe something which is contrary to the essential nature of a specific principle, it's irrational to maintain that principle. What did you think of my example? If I have good reasons to believe that some of the world's problems will never be solved, don't you think it's irrational for me to also believe that all the worlds problems will be resolved.
Here's what I think. I think that you really do not believe that there is good reasons to believe that some aspects of mind are not physical. You really believe in physicalism, but to avoid having to face issues like "the hard problem", you simply say 'well maybe the mind is not physical'. So you really do not believe that there are any good reason to accept that something is not physical, you just say that there is good reasons, in contradiction to what you truly believe, to avoid the problems which arise from what you truly believe.
Quoting Relativist
That directly contradicts what you said before, when you rejected extreme skepticism. You said there is uncontroversial facts. Now, you take the position of extreme skepticism, claiming "there's always some reason to doubt one's beliefs". If there is reason to doubt all your beliefs, how can you say that any of them represent "uncontroversial facts"? If you judge something as uncontroversial fact, then you are judging that there is no reason to doubt it.
What do you take to be the difference between "always some reason to doubt one's belief", implying extreme skepticism, and "good reasons" to believe in something? i assume you do recognize a difference.
Quoting Wayfarer
You're conflating the mental act of counting with four-ness. A group of 4 geese has a property in common with a group of 4 pebbles, whereas a group of 3 trees lacks this property. This property of four-ness is ontological. It exists irrespective of human minds or anyone doing a count.
We recognize the pattern of fourness and form the concept of 4 via the way of abstraction: consider multiple objects with common property and mentally subtract all other properties. This forms the basis for the concept of 4. The concept "exists" exclusively in the mind, whereas four-ness exists in certain states of affairs.
We also recognize that adding a pebble to a group of 3 pebbles creates a group of 4 pebbles. This is a logical relation, not a physical one. These logical relations are an epistemological ground for counting.
The intellectual capacity to abstract can be applied to other abstractions, so we can apply counting to abstractions.
Quoting Wayfarer
Why not? It's not magic or clairvoyance. Experts have insights - but only within their own field*. a chef's insight will be recipe related; he will not have the insight of a mathematician when it comes to proving theorems. It's pattern recognition, which artificial neural networks perform in rudimentary fashion.
_______________________________
* Conspiracy theorists also have "insights", and the same cognitive faculties are involved: they perceive patterns based on their background beliefs.
_______________________________
Quoting Wayfarer
Nothing is in hiding, but you're mashing together the physics and metaphysics. Let's be clear: physics theory makes the theoretical claim that everything in the material world (the domain of physics) is made of particles. It's a claim supported by evidence and theory. There's no good reason to doubt that the standard model of particle physics identifies all the elementary particles that account for the physical composition of everything (setting aside the mystery of dark matter and dark energy).
The metaphysical claim is that an object IS its physical compostion, there's nothing more to the object. Do you deny this is true for nonliving objects?
Quoting Wayfarer
Truths, meanings, logical relations aren't ontological-
they reflect patterns of thought. Truth is not a property that objects have; rather it is a label we apply to some statements. Logic applies to statements. Meaning is a mental association, not a physical property. Intentions are behavioral.
You are obviously in the habit of treating these 3 concepts as something more than patterns of thought, and this makes you incredulous to an alternative account. I'm not trying to convince you that this physicalist perspective is correct. I'm just trying to show it is coherent.
[Quote]Albert Einstein had good reason for asking the rhetorical question 'does the moon continue to exist when nobody is looking at it.' Do you appreciate why he would ask that question?[/quote]
I don't know enough about his perspective to answer that. I guess it could be viewed as a thought experiment in philosophy. But from my pragmatic perspective, it's a silly question: no sane person would think to doubt the moon exists unless they were presented this as a thought experiment to explain why they believe it so. So I expect Einstein didn't actually have doubts along these lines.
Quoting Wayfarer
I have absolutely not ignored it! I identified it as a "negative fact" - implying a large space of possibilities, and also asked you to suggest how to use this negative fact. You had little to offer: you noted it shouldn't be treated as an object. That, and you seem to insist that the negative fact falsifies physicalism. This led to discussing other aspects of physicalism, and it became clear that you don't understand physicalism (I've identified several errors you made in your characterizations).
Quoting Wayfarer
You're the one insisting physicalism is false on the basis of the "something", but you have no answers as to what it is (other than an additional negative fact: not an object).
Within the space of possibilities is that the "something" is a physical property that some or all objects have, that manifests as consciousness when matter is structured a certain way (like a brain with attached sense organs). This "physical" property is undetectable through scientific study, because it has no measureable effects. It manifests only as conscious states.
This is Michael Tye's theory. This adds a property to matter (inconsistent with traditional physicalism), but maintains the overall physicalist framework.
So if I must explain the negative fact, I can use this. Two questions for you: 1) can you propose a better alternative? 2) Can you think of a reason (on my terms,) I ought to reject it?
Quoting Wayfarer
Special pleading/double standard. You're trying to hold physicalist metaphysics to a scientific standard, while having no qualms about treating your own unverifiable/unfalsifiable assertions as reasonsble.
It's not parallel. Your example entails a contradiction, mine does not.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I don't think you understand IBE. An IBE is unreasonable only if there overlooked facts that would affect the analysis, or if there are overlooked alternative hypotheses that would be better than the selected hypothesis.
You also ignored my explanation of what I meant by "good reasons". You're incorrectly treating "good reasons" as entailing a conclusion that I regard as categorically true.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Here again, you're treating all beliefs as categorical: that I can only choose to believe a proposition true or false, and these entail absolute commitments. My view is that each belief has a level of certainty. Believing an analytic truth, or the Pythagorian theory would be an absolute certainty. Same with any belief established by deduction from premises we're certain about. But beliefs established by weighing evidence generally don't deserve the same level of certainty. It's a bit like being on a civil jury, whereca verdict is reached on a preponderance of evidence. This standard is clearly less than absolute certainty.
Extreme skeptics require something close to absolute certainty to hold a belief. Most reasonable people don't have this (rarely attainable) standard. We believe the moon is up there even when we aren't looking at it; we believe man landed on the moon, and that vaccines prevent diseases.
"Reason to doubt" = lower the level of certainty
[Quote]If you judge something as uncontroversial fact, then you are judging that there is no reason to doubt it.[/quote]
No. That's not how I use the term. I would have said "all facts", but then you could have brought up some crackpot idea you believe that I had not accounted for. Or a theist would bring up that I overlooked God. My intent was to focus on commonly accepted facts that have good epistemic support. This would include established science, but exclude speculative hypotheses. The term I chose was "uncontroversial facts". The phrase I put in bold may be better.
Yours does entail contradiction, that's the point, just like my example. Please explain how you think the two differ, other than simply saying one is contradiction and the other not. To me there is no real difference What do you think it is about the one, which makes it contradictory, while the other is not?
Quoting Relativist
How could the Pythagorean theorem constitute absolute certainty, when the hypotenuse of a square is irrational? That's like saying that the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, pi, is an absolute certainty, when it's precise value cannot even be stated.
You continue to practise your contradictory ways. An instance where the reality of uncertainty has been proven, an irrational ratio, you claim is an example of absolute certainty.
Its ontological but not physical - an intellectual act which enables the recognition of abstractions. The property can only be recognised by a mind capable of counting. Real numbers are independent of any particular mind, but they can only be grasped by a mind. And they're certainly not physical.
Quoting Relativist
Youre talking atomism. Ever since Heisenberg discovered uncertainty - 100 years ago as it happens - the possibility of atoms as ultimate point-particles has been undermined (or undetermined). Nowadays atoms are conceptualised as excitations of fields, and the ontological status of fields is far from settled. It is well known that the equations of quantum physics show that particles can be in superposition, i.e. have no definite location. This is incidentally one of the things that caused Einstein to ask that question. Nowadays, interpretation of physics with realist vs anti-realist arguments is still the basis of controversy which mitigates against the kind of physicalist realism you're proposing.
Quoting Relativist
I made it perfectloy explicit:
Quoting Wayfarer
The fact that you ignored it makes my argument for me!
Quoting Relativist
Well your screen name is Relativist, and you're preaching relativism.
As for 'special pleading', it's physicalism that does this. It appeals to physics as the basis of its ontology, but when presented with the inconvenient fact that today's physics seems to undermine physicalism, it will say it is 'not bound by physics'.
As for philosophical idealism, the one apodictic fact it begins with is the one proposed by Descartes - cogito ergo sum. Whereas physicalism attempts to account for that in terms of the objects the ultimate nature of which is indeterminable in the absence of an observer.
We ought to recognize this as the end of the rule of science. Physics has determined the limit to the usefulness of the scientific method. And what has been revealed is that there is a vast expanse which lies beyond that limit.
1) setting a practical epistemic bar for accepting a statement as true (but see #3). This is in opposition to extreme skeptics who set a bar so high, they profess to few beliefs.
2)(generally) treating bare possibilites as equivalent to zero probability when making epistemic judgements,
3) recognizing the nature of belief as a psychological state that has degrees of certainty, rather than categorically true and false
4) recognizing that these degrees of certainty tend to be imprecise (thus Bayes' theorem is inapplicable)
5. Trusting beliefs that are likely to be innate (e.g. belief in the existence of a world external to ourselves; default trust in our sensory input - but recognizing it to be fallible).
6. Fearlessly making truth judgements when it's impractical to withhold judgement.
If I gave it more thought, I could probably add a bit more.
BTW, your comment prompted me to ask DEEPSEEK what it meant. There are some parallels, but it's very different. E.g. it mentioned "pragmatic theory of truth", which I reject.
//Neils Bohr said 'It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature.'
That is neither polemic nor rhetoric.//
More precisely, physics is restricted to what we can say about nature. But metaphysics determines what we can say and is therefore not restricted in that way. That is why those who believe things like "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" are mislead into philosophies like physicalism, which assume that we are restricted in such a way, so that when physics reaches the limits to what we can say about nature, so does human knowledge.
The problem you present with "the inconvenient fact that today's physics seems to undermine physicalism", is that reality extends beyond the capacity of physics, and empirical science in general, to represent. If we are limited in our capacity for knowledge, to "what we can say about Nature", and we find that Nature extends beyond this, then the appearance is that a part of reality cannot be understood.
The true philosopher sees that when we hit what we cannot say, then we must find a new way to speak, if we want to talk about that. The reality is, that the means are adapted to end, therefore the method is restricted by the end. But the end is not restricted by the means. If the conventional end is, "what we can say about Nature", and we've reached that limit without satisfying our need for knowledge, then the goal must be changed. With that comes a change of means, method, allowing us to get beyond the boundary presented by "whereof we cannot speak". If "whereof one cannot speak" was a true barrier, knowledge would never get beyond infancy. Even Wittgenstein came to understand the falsity of that statement as exposed in his Philosophical Investigations where he inquired into the method by which we learn how to speak.
If the pain sensation exists only in the mind, then it is, in sense, an illusion with a representational character (not epiphenomenal). There needn't be a reason for the sensation to be what it is beyond the fact that it evolved this way because of random mutations that happened to have a positive impact on survival. But the problem remains as to how the firing of neurons creates this sense of pain.
I don't suggest this is a fatal flaw, but it opens the door to considering alternatives. But my problem with (for example) @Wayfarer's claims is that he only tears down the physicalist account, by suggesting the explanatory gap thoroughly falsifies physicalism. Then he offers no better alternative, so he's simply creating a much larger explanatory gap.
So you embrace a the platonic principle that (at least some) abstractions have objective existence that is independent of the objects that exhibit them. On the other hand, and as you know, I see no reason to believe such things. Immanent universals are considerably more parsimonious.
Explain the ontological relationship between a cluster of two protons (in the nucleus ofva helium atom) and the number 2.
There are good reasons to believe JFK was killed by a single person, acting alone.
There are good reasons to believe more than one person was involved in the killing of JFK
These assertions are not contradictory. They can both be true.
The problem though, is in your statement that physicalism is the best ontology and the one you believe in . And physicalism explicitly excludes the possibility of the nonphysical. In the JFK example you are not claiming that one is better than the other, and the one you believe in.
To make the JFK example comparable, you'd have to chose one as the best explanation, as the one you believe, then also claim that there is good reason to believe the other. For example, the best explanation, and the one I believe in, is a single person acting alone, however there is good reason to believe in more than one person.
Once you chose one, as the one that you believe in, you cannot claim that there is good reason to believe the other, without contradicting your own belief. So you cannot believe in physicalism yet also believe that there is good reason to believe in the nonphysical without self-contradicting.
I suggest you adjust your claim to "it is possible that physicalism is the best ontology". This would be recognition of your uncertainty in the matter, just like your JFK example indicates uncertainty.
In Armstrong's ontology:
-Everything that exists (every object) is a state of affairs, whose constituents are: the bare particular, a set of properties, and a set of relations to other states of affairs.
-Properties and relations are constituents of the states of affairs that comprise physical reality- hence they are part of the physical world. They are not objects, because they are not states of affairs. They exist immanently as constituents of states of affairs.
I already explained the "way of abstraction".
Quoting Wayfarer
I was giving a simplified account to avoid having to describe quantum fields. I'll rephrase it:
[I]physics theory makes the theoretical claim that everything that exists in the material world (the domain of physics) is composed of elements of the quantum fields (as identified in the standard model) . It's a claim supported by evidence and theory. .[/i]
Do you agree there is no good reason to doubt that the standard model identifies the physical composition of everything that exists (setting aside the mystery of dark matter and dark energy)?
Do you understand how this scientific hypothesis is distinct from the metaphysical claim is that an object IS its physical compostion?
Do you deny that this metaphysical claim is true for all nonliving objects? If you do deny it, can you make a compelling case for your view?
Quoting Wayfarer
You've brought up a number of mental activities you considered "obvious" that are easily accounted for in physicalism, so your judgement of what is "obvious" is suspect.
What you purport to exclude is what comprises the "negative fact", from which you have not, and can not, derive a positive fact. I've repeatedly pointed out that a negative fact (what something is NOT) tells us almost nothing. An object that is "not a duck" could be anything, and therefore "not a duck" is not a clue as to what the object IS.
It's relevant because you're claiming the negative fact falsifies physicalism. You haven't really flasified it because this "negative fact" is hypothesis and tentative- based solely on the absence of a complete physicalist account of every aspect of mental life. So physicalism is still (at least) possible. You have said nothing stronger about any alternatives, so we simply have a large space of possibilities that includes physicalist and non-physicalist theories.
Quoting Wayfarer
No, I'm not. There's nothing relative about truth; my point was simply that it's a mental concept, not some platonic object.
Quoting Wayfarer
You have an understanding of physicalism that is biased and false. I've explained the actual relationship between science and physicalism, and you choose to ignore what I said and repeat your false understanding.
The irony is that I've tried very hard to see where your negative hypotheses would lead, going so far as to entertain it as a fact. Unlike you, I have been willing to be wrong; willing to entertain other possibilities. In response, you've displayed complete ignorance as to what physicalism actually is by presenting naive objections (that simply display your lack of understanding of physicalism), and insisting on your distorted view of its relation to science. That is an ineffective way to make your case, and it was a blind alley that had virtually nothing to do with the "negative hypothesis" I had been willing to entertain as fact.
It's impossible to falsify something you don't understand. It would have been more effective to concede that physicalism is reasonable in every way EXCEPT the mind, and concentrated on somehow doing something with your negative hypothesis. Instead, you've turned much of this conversation into my refuting your misunderstandings about general physicalism.
I saw no reason to state the obvious. You figured out exactly what I had in mind (your stated example), as I expected you would.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Acknowledging there are reasons why I might be wrong is being intellectually honest; that is not a contradiction.
On this particular example, I indeed believe a single person acted alone. But I read awhile back that there was auditory evidence of a second shooter. This evidence is "good reason" to suggest I could be wrong, however it is not a good ENOUGH reason for me to change my mind. Suppose I encountered 5 additional bits of evidence to support a second shooter. THEN I would change my mind. Individually, each bit of evidence is "good" in that it is relevant information and could contribute to drawing a different inference. It is the totality of available evidence that the conclusion should be based on and that totality can change over time as additional facts are learned.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover That might be appropriate for an extreme skeptic, who chooses only to believe things that can be proven to be logically necessary. IBE does not entail logical necessity. I believe Oswald acted alone, but I know I'm possibly wrong. If I merely said it was possible he acted alone, I would not be representing my view as accurrately.
Further, my view on physicalism is strictly subjective judgement. I try to be rational, taking into account all information I'm aware of, but I know I'm fallible, and limited by what I have studied and considered. So I usually don't make bold statements like "physicalism is true". Rather, I say "I believe physicalism is true", and am usually willing to explain why, and interested in hearing valid criticism - "good reasons" why I might be wrong.
*edit*
I ran across the following statement by (Christian, dualist) pholosopher Ed Feser:
[I]"But other contemporary naturalists Dennett and the Churchlands, for example, not to mention countless lesser lights of the sort who write crude atheist pamphlets and pop neuroscience books cluelessly suggest that there is no good reason to think that the mind will fail to yield to the same sort of reductive explanation in terms of which everything else in nature has been accounted for."[/i]
So he is acknowledging that there can be "good reasons" for a position one disagrees with, since he's complaining that these naturalists won't even acknowledge that.
But how can you 'set aside' the posit that current physics accounts for 4% of the totality of the universe? And the entrenched controversies around the whole question of the interpretation of physics and what is says about the nature of reality? You really need to read some more in this subject.
Quoting Relativist
Remind me! Everything you've said in this exchange is predicated on equating the model of physics with a philosophy of everything. You're simply abstracting what you think are 'existents' from the models of physics as the basis for philosophy, when the very nature of the existence of these forces and entities is still very much an open question.
Quoting Relativist
What I consider 'obvious' is that the observer or subject is implicitly present in physicalism, but has been suppressed for methodological reasons.
Quoting Relativist
Transcendental is not the same as objective. Universals are transcendental because they transcend the specific forms in which they are instantiated. For example a number can be represented by a variety of different symbolic forms but still retain its identity. As Bertrand Russell said, universals are not thoughts, though when known they appear as thoughts.
Quoting Relativist
He is saying the exact opposite of what you describe him as saying. He is saying that Churchlands and Dennett are 'clueless' for suggesting that 'there is no good reason to think that the mind will fail to yield to the same sort of reductive explanation in terms of which everything else in nature has been accounted for.'
This conversation has been going on since 5th November 2024 - I happen to remember, as it was the date of the US presidential election. And I think it's run it's course. Thanks and so long.
I think the idea of qualia is misleading. The way I understand it when I see something I don't see a quale or the experiential quality of what I'm seeing. I can make a post hoc judgement about the quality of my experience and then reify that into entities collectively referred to as qualia.
So, I agree with your characterization "an illusion with a representational character". If all perception and thought is neural activity, then being reflectively conscious of what is being perceived (or perhaps more accurately what has just been perceived) and not being reflectively conscious of that would be two different kinds of neural activity, each with their own effects, and hence being conscious would not be epiphenomenal.
For me, to claim that there is a non-physical aspect of mind would be to claim that there is something at work which is completely independent of the whole embodied energy economy of the percipient in its environment, and that seems not only implausible but even incoherent.
I agree that @Wayfarer seems to think that the inability of physical science to explain the felt quality of experience is a slam dunk refutation of physicalism, and to me that seems to be a completely unjustified conclusion.
I take this as an admission of your own self-contradiction then.
Quoting Relativist
Intellectual honesty would be to admit that you were wrong in the claims you made about physicalism. Are you ready for that yet?
Quoting Relativist
You are wrong here. If you admit to the possibility of a second shooter then you cannot claim to believe that there was only one shooter without contradicting yourself. In other words, if you truly believe that it is possible that there was a second shooter, you cannot, at the same time, truly believe that there was only one shooter. The two beliefs exclude each.
If you believe that X might not be the case, you do not actually believe in X, though you might believe that X is probable. The issue here is that physicalism excludes the possibility of the nonphysical. Physicalism does not posit that the nonphysical is improbable, it excludes the nonphysical. It is not a matter of saying that the nonphysical is improbable, it is a matter of saying that the nonphysical is not. The nonphysical is unreal. Now this is a big difference because once you allow for the reality of possibility, which is required to account for your attitude of "probable" rather than certain, you need to be able to find a position for possibility, and probability within your reality.
What kind of physical existence would possibility, or probability have? You could deny the reality of possibility, but then you self-contradict, if you claim that physicalism is probable, because physicalism has no place for possibility within its proposed reality. This is what "physicalism" entails, denying the possibility of the nonphysical. If you believe that the nonphysical is a possibility, you do not believe in physicalism. That's plain and simple. So, I'll ask you, do you believe in physicalism, or do you believe in possibility?
Quoting Relativist
This is blatant contradiction. If you think that it is possible that Oswald did not act alone, you do not actually believe that he acted alone. You are simply saying that you believe both, without considering the meaning of what you are saying. People can say all sorts of contradictory things, but please think about what you have said, and apply a true form of "intellectual honesty". Do you believe that Oswald may not have acted alone? If so, then you do not believe that he acted alone. How could you honestly say "I believe that Oswald acted alone, and I also believe that he might not have acted alone". Which of the two do you honestly believe?
Quoting Relativist
You got that backward. He is saying "no good reason". That is what "physicalism" implies, because of the necessity which is associated with it, that there is no good reason to consider the nonphysical. To believe in physicalism is to believe that there is "no good reason" to think that the mind could be anything other than physical. That's why "good reason to think that the mind has nonphysical aspects" contradicts physicalism.
You persist in treating all beliefs as categorical, despite my repeated efforts to describe it to you.
Answer this: when you say "I believe X", does this mean you are certain of X?
If not, then how do you verbally describe your uncertainty, to distinguish it from statements that you do feel certain about?
If yes, then what phrase(s) do you use to convey your attitude toward X, when you lack certainty.
I have never said such a thing - you just assumed it. Multiple times I've said that I judge physicalism to be the metaphysical theory that is "inference to best explanation". An IBE is based on a set of facts, and in this case - the scope is universal: all facts about the world. Speculations are not facts.
Science gives us quite a few facts, so of course a viable metaphysical theory needs to account for them.
Quoting Wayfarer
You need to start trying to grasp my reasons for considering physicalism, as I described above, instead of attacking a strawman. There are no facts about dark matter and energy to be accounted for. With regard to QM: there is no fact regarding which interpretation is correct. An interpretation is a metaphysical hypothesis, and physicalism is consistent with most of them.
Quoting Wayfarer
Red herring: it's irrelevant to the question.
Quoting Wayfarer
Nevertheless, you reject the account I've given that universals exist immanently.
This raises an important question: what are you trying to achieve in this discussion?
--Are you just explaining why you reject physicalism? All I'm seeing is that you're rejecting a strawman.
--If you're trying to convince me physicalism is false, then you're going about it wrong. You can't prove it false by making a claim that's inconsistent with physicalism. You've done this repeatedly.
I GAVE you an opening, by admitting there's an issue with the "hard problem", so that I was willing to entertain the "negative fact" (actually a negative hypothesis) that there's something about the mind that is non-physical. All you did with this was to suggest some vague possibilities. This led me to reconsider what I'd said about the "hard problem" because there are at least 3 possibilities that are consistent with physicalism (illusionism, Michael Tye's theory, and nonreductive physicalism).
Quoting Wayfarer
You don't seem to understand what I was debating with MetaphysicianUndercover: I was simply defending my semantics, that one can believe X despite there being "good reasons" why X might be false. Here's the sentence:
"[these contemporary naturalists] cluelessly suggest that there is no good reason to think that the mind will fail to yield to the same sort of reductive explanation in terms of which everything else in nature has been accounted for."
From this, I infer that Feser thought these guys should admit there ARE good reasons " to think that the mind will fail to yield to the same sort of reductive explanation in terms of which everything else in nature has been accounted for". In the statement, he isn't saying that these reasons should have induced them to abandon reductive naturalism (even if he believes that to be the case); he's just saying they ought to at least acknowledge there are some good reasons to think there's no reductive naturalism.
I'm not attacking a strawman - youre treating the facts of science as if they were metaphysically transparent, a window to 'how the universe truly is', when they are plainly not. You say physicalism is the inference to best explanation from all the facts. Yet what counts as fact in science is already theory-laden. Quantum mechanics provides experimental regularities, but the interpretations of what those regularities mean about reality are metaphysically contested. To say physicalism is consistent with most interpretations is just to admit that physics itself doesnt decide the metaphysical question.
And then theres the incompleteness issue. Even if you bracket dark matter and energy, youre still working with a framework that according to its own posits provides for only a minute percentage of the totality of the cosmos and leaves many questions about it own foundations unresolved. How can that be invoked as the basis of a metaphysics as 'first philosophy', when it is plainly contingent in nature.
There are academics and scientists, some of whom say that quantum physics proves that the universe is mental, others who claim that it shows there are infinitely many worlds, and yet others who say that quantum physics is simply wrong. So if physicalism is consistent with wildly divergent interpretations of what physics means, how could it be meaningful?
Quoting Relativist
You say universals exist immanently as constituents of states of affairs. But what does that really mean? If I say this apple is larger than that plum, the 'larger than relation' is not something you can isolate in either piece of fruit. Its not inherent in either object, but grasped by an intellect making the comparison.
Thats why I say such relations are not immanent in objects but imputed to them by reason. They are formal judgements. Armstrongs ontology tries to locate them in the furniture of the world, without acknowledging that they are in a fundamental sense dependent on the mind which recognises them.
Quoting Relativist
You say I've been vague, but Ive been quite explicit. Let me spell it out.
First: the hard problem, as Chalmers framed it in his original paper, is about experience. There is information-processing in the brain, but there is also the first-person, subjective aspect what Nagel called something it is like to be a conscious organism. That what-it-is-like is experience, and objective, third-person accounts dont capture it:
[hide="Reveal"][quote=David Chalmers, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness;https://consc.net/papers/facing.html]The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974, 'What is it Like to be a Bat') has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.[/quote][/hide]
Second: this stems from the constitution of modern science since Galileo, which gave primary reality to the measurable, objective domain and relegated how phenomena appear in experience to the secondary domain of the subjective. Physicalism inherits this stance, but in doing so it excludes something very obvious: the subject to whom a theory is meaningful, the very mind that provides the definitions and draws the conclusions (which, incidentally, is also what shows up in 'the observer problem' in quantum physics.)
Third: The problem is that you can only conceive of what is not physical as a 'non-physical thing'. You request 'evidence' of 'some non-physical thing', but that is because of the objectivism that is inherent in the physicalist attitude. The 'non-physical' is not 'out there somewhere', it is in the way the mind constructs a coherent and unified world from the disparate elements of science, sense-data and judgement. This insight is, of course, fundamental to Kant, and was developed further by phenomenology.
So: the mind is not outside the physicalist scope because its a spooky Cartesian thinking thing or ghost in the machine. Its excluded because it is not an object of cognition at all, but the seat of cognition the condition that makes objects intelligible in the first place. Demanding evidence of a non-physical thing only shows how objectivism presupposes what it cannot see. This is why Kant, and later phenomenology, makes the constitutive role of mind explicit. Physicalism of Armstrong's variety methodically screens this out, or ignores this fundamental fact. Hence the critique given in 'The Blind Spot of Science'.
So I don't accept that these are vague arguments. Perhaps you might actually address them.
When I say "I believe X" it means that I think X is the case, I think it is true. When I think X may be the case I say "I believe that X may be the case", or "X is possible". Do you recognize the difference between these two?
Neither says anything about certainty or uncertainty, and you bring this up as a distraction. We were not talking about certainty and uncertainty, we were talking about what we believe, whether you believe in physicalism, or you believe that physicalism is possible. When i want to describe my certainty or uncertainty, I use those words. Do you recognize the difference between "I believe X", and "I believe X is possible", regardless of the degree of certitude?
You simply haven't been paying attention. I explicitly stated:
Quoting Relativist
"Degrees of certainty" are key to the "modest Bayesian epistemology*" that I advocate. It is an epistemological approach discussed by philosopher Mark Kaplan in an article in The Oxford Handbook of Epistemology ("Decision Theory and Epistemology".
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
For many propositions you've evaluated, you will have some sense of whether it's certain, highly likely, unlikely, etc. The level of certainty is relevant to how one evaluates other, related information to draw conclusions. Consider a valid deductive argument from premises you considered possible, but unlikely, vs a conclusion drawn from premises that you consider highly likely.
This is the point I have been driving at: the issue of degrees of certainty as attitudes toward propositions, and the effect this has on further epistemic analysis. The distraction was your quibbling about the use of the word "belief" - because your only focus was to tell me I'm wrong, rather than making an effort to understand my point.
_________
*"Modest Bayesian epistemology doesn't suffer from the mathematical fallacy that orthodox Bayesian epistemology suffers from.
OK, that makes it clear then, You are admitting that you do not believe that physicalism is the best ontology, you believe that it might be the best ontology depending on how reality is understood.
Quoting Relativist
And your claim that it is probably the best ontology is very subjective, base on cherry-picked principles. Do you recognize that the fact that your judgement in this matter is very subjective, is very strong evidence that physicalism is not the best ontology? This is because physicalism does not account for the subjective aspect of judgement, and you are assigning principal position to it?
Quoting Relativist
This is the point I've been driving at. The fact that you judge ontology in this way, is very indicative of a nonphysical reality. Therefore your claim to believe in physicalism is hypocritical. If you really believed in physicalism you would be certain, due to the objectivity of what you believe in, rather than wishy washy as you demonstrate. For analogy, if you claim that you are atheist, then be atheist, rather than agnostic.
It's not that hard. Just recognize that the apple and the plum are aspects of the same state of affairs - a state of affairs in which the apple has a larger volume than the plum.
We disagree about how the word "belief" should be used.
The problem with saying "physicalism might be the best ontology" is that it fails to communicate that I have made a judgement. Judgements are fallible, and only as good as the basis on which they are made.
You seem to say "I believe X" only if you're certain of X. This suggests either: there are few propostions you "believe" (in your terms) or you have an unjustified certainty in your positions.
I apply the word "belief" to all propositions I have judged to be true, irrespective of how strong my justification is. But, as I said, my attitude toward the proposition is more nuanced: there is a level of certainty attached to it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Judgements are always subjective. They are unavoidably based on background beliefs (judgements previously made). But I am always willing to explain why I believe it - thus opening myself to correction. This includes having those principles and background beliefs challenged, so that I can reevaluate. I did this here in this thread. I invite you to challenge the principles I apply (namely: IBE, and the selection criteria).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Judgement is unavoidably a subjective process, because it can only be made on the facts at one's disposal (background beliefs, methodology, and cognitive abilities). These aspects (entirely nature + nurture) account for the subjective nature of judgement, consistent with physicalism.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I don't regard it as "wishy washy" to honestly explain the basis of my judgement, and admit fallibility, and be open to reasonable criticism. That's all I'm doing.
I have argued that most of our beliefs (my definition) are based on judgements made on incomplete data. The best we can do, in most cases, is inference to best explanation.
I went for many years self-labelling as an agnostic. It seemed appropriate because I deemed a god's existence to be possible. Over time, I've come to conclude that a creator-god is implausible, so I now label myself as atheist. It's nevertheless logically possible such a being exists. I'd consider it wishy-washy to fail to make a judgement of something that seems so implausible, merely because I'm possibly wrong. (It's of course possible Yahweh will some day reveal himself to me; if convinced my experience were veridical, I would change my mind. Obviously, I judge this won't happen).
With your semantics, I don't see how you could be anything other than agnostic - unless you base your certainty of God on "faith". Neither God's existence nor non-existence can be proven, so both are possible.
Before I respond again, please answer the question I asked:
[B]What is your objective?
--Are you just explaining why you reject physicalism?
-Are you trying to convince me physicalism is false? [/b]
There are other possibilities, course. Keeping it open-ended will never get anywhere.
Recognition relies on understanding the concept 'larger than'. Of course, an apple *is* larger than a plum but the mind still has a fundamental role in that recognition.
[hide][quote=Bertrand Russell, World of Universals]Consider such a proposition as 'Edinburgh is north of London'. Here we have a relation between two places, and it seems plain that the relation subsists independently of our knowledge of it. When we come to know that Edinburgh is north of London, we come to know something which has to do only with Edinburgh and London: we do not cause the truth of the proposition by coming to know it, on the contrary we merely apprehend a fact which was there before we knew it. The part of the earth's surface where Edinburgh stands would be north of the part where London stands, even if there were no human being to know about north and south, and even if there were no minds at all in the universe. ...We may therefore now assume it to be true that nothing mental is presupposed in the fact that Edinburgh is north of London. But this fact involves the relation 'north of', which is a universal; and it would be impossible for the whole fact to involve nothing mental if the relation 'north of', which is a constituent part of the fact, did involve anything mental. Hence we must admit that the relation, like the terms it relates, is not dependent upon thought, but belongs to the independent world which thought apprehends but does not create.
This conclusion, however, is met by the difficulty that the relation 'north of' does not seem to exist in the same sense in which Edinburgh and London exist. If we ask 'Where and when does this relation exist?' the answer must be 'Nowhere and nowhen'. There is no place or time where we can find the relation 'north of'. It does not exist in Edinburgh any more than in London, for it relates the two and is neutral as between them. Nor can we say that it exists at any particular time. Now everything that can be apprehended by the senses or by introspection exists at some particular time. Hence the relation 'north of' is radically different from such things. It is neither in space nor in time, neither material nor mental; yet it is something.[/quote]
Armstrong, whom we've been discussing, would insist that such relations are really in the objects or the world, but critics argue hes smuggling intelligibility into ontology by neglecting the role of the intellect in recognizing such universals. The key point is that such relations don't exist 'in the same way' as do objects.[/hide]
Quoting Relativist
I argue against physicalism because I believe that it's an inadequate understanding of the nature of existence. Beings are not purely or only physical, but we as a culture have lost touch with the alternative. My purpose isnt simply to reject physicalism for the sake of argument, but to show why I think it leaves something crucial out of the picture.
This conviction goes back to before I started participating in forums (around 2009) but since then, I've been researching the question of why physicalism became so influential in culture.
OK, now you need to recognize two distinct judgements here. One, the judgement that physicalism is the best ontology, the other, the judgement that judgements are fallible.
Quoting Relativist
As I said, "certainty" is a distraction which you are throwing in. You believe judgements are fallible, so do I, therefore certainty is irrelevant.
Quoting Relativist
This is where I think you are making things up. I do not believe that you attach a "level of certainty" to everything you believe. In general when justification suffices, people pass judgement, and the matter is concluded. We no longer have to deliberate. That is the benefit of passing judgement. If a person was still undecided they would not pass judgement, and deliberation would continue.
I agree that you may have made a judgement that all judgements are fallible, and you may respect this at each instance of passing judgement, but I do not believe that you attach a level of certainty to each judgement you make. To determine the degree of certainty would be very time consuming and not worth the effort. The reason i say this, is that judgements are made for the purpose of acting, and you are going to act on the judgement, with a healthy respect for fallibility, whether you are 75% certain or 85% certain. In the vast majority of judgements, to figure out the degree of certitude would be a totally useless waste of time, therefore it is not practised.
Quoting Relativist
I do not believe that the subjective nature of judgement is consistent with physicalism which holds that everything is potentially understandable through the objective science of physics. To be consistent, you'd have to say that judgement appears to be subjective, but this is really an illusion. Nature and nurture could account for all aspects of judgement so that the judgement would be objective without anything truly subjective about it. Determinism.
Quoting Relativist
The point though, is that you have gone beyond making a judgement with incomplete data, along with a healthy respect for fallibility, to making a judgement when you explicitly state that there are good reasons for the very opposite of what you have concluded in that judgement. This is not a matter of "incomplete data", it is a matter of ignoring evidence which is contrary to your conclusion. "Incomplete data" implies nothing contrary to your judgement, yet not enough data for certainty. Here it is a matter of contrary evidence. That is why I said your position is irrational, and contrary to objective science. And since this particular judgement is not required for the purpose of any immediate action, the rational response is to suspend judgement and deliberate longer. It is irrational to make the judgement in spite of contrary evidence.
Quoting Relativist
Sure, but in the case we are discussing, it is not only logically possible that the truth is contrary to your judgement, but also you admit that there is good evidence for what is contrary to your judgement. There is a big difference between something merely being logically possible, and there being good evidence for that thing. When there is good evidence which is contrary to what you believe, it's time to reconsider your belief.
Quoting Relativist
I disagree. I believe that the reality of God has already long ago been proven, by the cosmological argument.
Correct- I don't have a level of certainty for every judgement. [U]Modest[/u] Bayesian epistemology doesn't assume that I do:
[I]"Let me begin the sketch with Modest Bayesianisms psychology. It is, true to the name, modest. In contrast to its orthodox ancestor, which strains our credulity by assuming that actual persons have real-valued degree of confidence assignments, Modest Bayesianism assumes only that any person harbors at least some confidence-rankings: that she can, for at least some pairs of hypotheses, say in which (if either) she invests the greater confidence, in which (if either) she invests equal confidence."[/i]
--Mark Kaplan (p 650, Oxford Handbook).
Only in situations where one has a choice of hypotheses is the degree of certainty needed. At that point, one can reflect on the relative degrees of confidence one has between the hypotheses.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Your criticism would be appropriate for orthodox Bayesianism, but doesn't apply to Modest Bayesianism. Indeed, it's a minority of the time that one would have any reason to consider level of certainty. The Kennedy Assassination question is one such example. But it could occur anytime one hears of evidence contrary to one's prior judgements- the rational thing to do is to reevaluate the judgement.
This highlights an error that conspiracy theorists make: they are overconfident in their initial judgement, and rationalize contrary evidence. The initial confidence should be tempered by the quality of the evidence, and new contrary evidence should prompt one to reevaluate.
Similarly with IBEs: new, information contrary to the prior judgement should often lead to reevaluation.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Utter nonsense. Physicalism is an ontological grounding thesis. It's a gross caricature to suggest this means physics can replace epistemology.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You are quibbling with semantics. You interpreted "good reasons" to entail facts that contradicted my prior judgement. I explained this was not what I meant by the phrase. I have identified no facts that contradict physicalism. If I use your private lexicon, I would not label the point a "good reason" to reject physicalism, but rather that it constitutes relevant information that should be taken into account (as I previously described, and you ignored).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
"Proven?" Do you mean that you judge some cosmological argument to offer irrefutable proof of God, or do you draw a less certain conclusion?
You earlier made this assertion:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That's a claim often made by devotees of some cosmological arguments. Does the fact I proved you wrong about this lead you to reevaluate your conclusion, or is this irrelevant to the particular cosmological argument you embrace?
My impression is that the things you have said are "left out" by physicalism are category error. Physicalism is an ontological grounding thesis, not an effective paradigm for answering all questions about the human condition - your areas of interest and concern.
In theory, you could falsify physicalism by identifying some aspect of the human condition that is logically impossible to account for under physicalism. But in practice, the problem is in your framing of the issues. You frame it in the way you think about it, which is rooted in your subjective world view.
This approach gives you a valid reason to reject physicalism (i.e. it's inconsistent with your world-view), but does not constitute the objective take-down of physicalism that you think it is. Example: your rejection of immanent universals (like "4") and insistence that you established the existence of something nonphysical. From a physicalist perspective, this is trivially false. Issues like this prove you don't understand the physicalist paradigm, and the fact you've done this repeatedly, even after I've explained physicalist perspectives, suggests to me that you aren't making the effort to understand it.
Similarly with the way you see the relationship between science and the metaphysical theory of physicalism. You reject my description of the relationship, and you misconstrue it or insist on your own view. By rejecting my description, you have eliminated any possibility of objectively falsifying it, you've only falsified a strawman version that you have in mind. It also demonstrates that you aren't trying to understand.
I don't think you are interested in understanding. If you were, you'd ask more and assert less. That's observation/inference, not criticism. Physicalism isn't for you. It's inconsistent with your world view and it doesn't address your areas of concern and interest (what you consider "crucial"). I suggest you leave it at that, and accept that it fits fine with the world view of others.
But surely philosophy is concerned with the whole range of questions about the human condition. The task of science is to explore and explain what exists; philosophy asks what it means to exist. That inquiry is not merely subjective in the sense of personal preference, but recognises that the subject is ineliminable.
Quoting Relativist
Yet youve said repeatedly that physics provides the paradigm for metaphysics that the ontological grounding is the ontology of physics. You said earlier
Quoting Relativist
That burden, as you phrase it, could only be met by demonstrating the objective existence of some non-physical thing. But this already presumes the physicalist framing, where what counts as real must be an object existing in the same way as physical entities.
On immanent universals: my criticisms here are not inventions of my own theyve been made by many philosophers. If I tracked down the sources, I could easily point to published critiques (e.g. E. J. Lowe, The Possibility of Metaphysics (Oxford, 1998) - Lowe argues against Armstrongs immanent realism, suggesting that it fails to account for the reality of universals and necessary connections.)
Quoting Relativist
And that is relativism in action. You hold physicalism as true; I work from an idealist framework. You dont recognise the kinds of arguments I offer, not because they are subjective, but because they cut against what you take to be undeniable. Physicalism starts by bracketing out the subject in order to ascertain what exists independently of the subject; Kantian idealism (which you don't seem to recognise) shows why this is untenable.
Quoting Relativist
I've learned a great deal from this forum, about new subjects, schools of thought, and philosophers that I'd never heard of. I read constantly, often the sources that others have recommended, and I often quote from external sources in support of my arguments. So, sure, I'm interested in understanding,
But the bottom line is, you can't conceive of a way in which physicalism might be false. So, I'm quite happy to leave it there, but I will not concede that what I'm arguing is 'subjective' in any pejorative sense. But I will agree that my philosophy is incompatible with physicalism, as I would hope it to be!
//I also note you had nothing to say about David Chalmers challenge to physicalism//
In this case, you have what you called good reason to believe that the hypothesis is false. How would this affect the degree of certainty? I think it is irrational to choose a hypotheses when there is strong evidence (good reason) which indicates that it is false.
However, the issue is really much more complicated than what you describe. What happens often, is that a person will select a hypotheses with incomplete data, as you suggest. The extent of the data which is unknown is itself unknown, so the certainty level may be higher than it ought to be. The relevance of the unknown data cannot be accounted for, because the data is unknown. Therefore the data which is judged is arbitrarily weighted relative to the unknown data.
Then, as time passes more data will become available to the individual(s) who made that judgement. The data may actually be directly contrary to the accepted hypotheses, but since the hypotheses is already accepted, and plays an active role in the lives of those who accept it, they simply adjust, make an exception to the rule to allow for the now evident contrary data, and continue to work with the hypotheses, which we now have data that confirms it is faulty. In other words, the hypotheses is judged with incomplete data, it is put to use, and with use, data comes out which falsifies it. But since it has become so useful, instead of going back to the original judgement and reassessing, we simply make an exception which allows us to work around the faultiness of the hypotheses. This is actually very common in physics.
Quoting Relativist
Yes, physicalism is an ontological grounding thesis. However, epistemology is what ontology grounds. Therefore it is you who speaks nonsense here.
Quoting Relativist
Your use of "facts" here is misplaced. You have talked yourself out of the usefulness of "facts", by insisting that beliefs are judged by degree of certainty. So if there is such a thing as a fact, it is irreleavnt because you do not consider any beliefs to be facts.
You have identified beliefs which you have, which contradict physicalism, i.e. that you have reason to believe that the mind has a nonphysical aspect. Therefore you believe contradictory things. To resolve the contradiction within your own beliefs you need to either demonstrate to yourself that the mind is physical, or else reject physicalism.
Yes, as you say, you have "relevant information that should be taken into account". That relevant information is that you now believe yourself to have evidence which contradicts that judgement you already made.
Quoting Relativist
Yes, I believe the cosmological argument provides irrefutable proof of God. In case your not familiar with it, here is a simplified version.
We observe that it is always the case that the potential for the physical object is prior in time to the actual existence of any physical object. We also know that something actual is required to actualize any potential. Therefore we can conclude that there is something actual which is prior to every physical object. That is what is known as God.
Quoting Relativist
Duh. Your "proof" was the following:
Quoting Relativist
I've given numerous, documented reasons for my arguments, including:
All of these are dismissed by you as 'category errors' or 'not relevant' without any attempt at addressing them.
Quoting Wayfarer
Who are you showing this to? Yourself? Me? If it's me, then it's only worth my time if you are trying to convince me, rather than just "witnessing" it to me (like the Jehovah's witness tells me, when I answer the door). Otherwise we're just stating our positions and reacting to what the other person says- a waste of our time.
I'll respond to your last post based on the assumption that you're endeavoring to convince me. But please clarify, so I can understand if its worth continuing.
Quoting Wayfarer
This has no bearing on the what I said, except to the extent that Philosophy deals with more than ontology (the ONLY thing physicalism is dealing with).
Quoting Wayfarer
I never said either of those things. You're AGAIN demonstrating your lack of understanding!
Quoting Wayfarer
You're skipping over my key point, in that quote:
that philosophical issues can generally be dealt with while ignoring ontology. Ontology could be more of a distraction. You don't agree, but you haven't explained why you disagree. Set aside what I claimed your burden to be, and just show why it's "crucial" that I reject physicalism to discuss the philosophical issues that concern you.
My claim is that I can consider most philosophical issues even when framed in terms inconsistent with physicalism. That's because I regard the framing as paradigm, which can be utilized without ontological commitent to the paradigm.
But if there are issues (or solutions to issues) that DO require some (non-physicalist) ontological commitments, why wouldn't you have the burden of making a case for those commitments? If you believe it impossible to meet the burden, then how can you than construe this as an error my part? Sure, you disagree with me on physicalism, but if you haven't truly falsified it to me, then you have no rational basis to complain about my view on the subject. To do so seems similar to a Christian lamenting my failure to experience the joy of Jesus' love for me, because I'm an ignorant atheist.
I hope to make a plausible case for anyone reading. So, sure, I seek to persuade. I've explained, I hope, that I believe physicalism is lacking in some fundamental respects (as would any other critic of physicalism.) As you are advocating physicalism, then I would hope to show you in particular what's wrong with it.
Quoting Relativist
Would I be correct in saying that you believe that 'ontology' comprises 'the set of all actually existing things', and that your position is that all actually existing things are physical? After all, you said:
Quoting Relativist
I dont intend to misrepresent you, but when you define physicalism as the thesis that everything that exists is composed of physical things, governed by physical forces and laws of nature, supported by an argument from 'the scope of physics', then from my point of view it does sound like physics is being taken as the ontological grounding for your metaphysics. How is it not?
Quoting Relativist
I have, repeatedly, but you haven't engaged with the arguments I've put forward.
First, do you recognize any cogency in David Chalmers' argument? That 'the nature of experience' cannot be fully captured by scientific descriptons? If you don't, why not? If you do, how does it fail as argument against physicalism?
Second: I've made the point (and again, this is not something of my devising), that scientific method assumes at the outset a division between subject and object, and assigns primary reality to the objectively-measurable attributes of objects, while assigning appearances to the so-called 'secondary attributes' of the subjective mind. I'm saying that physicalism overlooks or ignores this methodological division, and this has philosophical consequences. This is the thrust of the article The Blind Spot of Science is the Neglect of Experience. The thrust of phenomenological philosophy is based on recognising the implications of this 'bifurcation' of the world into subjective and objective.
Third: I've mentioned the conflicing interpretations of physics. Rather than open a whole can of worms, let me boil it down to this question. Neils Bohr said "It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature." Werner Heisenberg: 'What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." Now, surely, this has some bearing on your physicalist thesis. These two scientists were central to the discovery of the modern theory of the atom. Yet they're saying that physics does not describe nature as it is. Do you think that is so? If not, why?
Quoting Relativist
This seems to rest on a misunderstanding of philosophy as such. Scientific models can indeed be treated as paradigms without ontological commitment Newtonian mechanics still works fine for spacecraft navigation, even if we know relativity is more fundamental. Same with quantum physicists' 'Shut up and calculate'. But philosophy isnt just a pragmatic use of conceptual models. Its concern is precisely with what is real, and what it means to exist. To treat philosophical frameworks as if they can be referenced without ontological commitment is to miss the point of philosophy. Ontology can't be firewalled of to a specialised sub-division separate from the rest of philosophy, it's intrinsic to it.
I've given the above arguments repeatedly over the course of this thread, and to my recollection, you haven't engaged with any of them, other than the vague accusation of them being 'category mistakes'. If they are, then how so?
This is a strawman simply because we have no more reliable, or even any other reliable, guide, to "how the universe truly is" than science.
Quoting Relativist
If you are waiting for Wayfarer to provide an actual argument you'll be waiting a long time, perhaps forever. I have never seen a genuine argument form him?all I've seen is dogma and cut and paste passages from supposed authorities.
You might turn your attention to the 3 arguments presented in the post above this one.
Such as the claim that 'It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature'. How would you respond to that?
I'd say that is a claim, not an argument. (Wasn't it Niels Bohr who said that, and why should we not see your use of it as an appeal to authority?) Can you provide an argument that supports it.
I provided the argument for it upthread, but it was ignored. That argument was, you have wildly divergent views of what quantum physics means (realist, idealist, anti-realist etc), so how can you appeal to physics for a metaphysical thesis, when these foundational issues are still a matter of controversy.
Quoting Janus
They're known as 'citations'.
Philosophical differences are always deeply rooted, and unless the difference is very mundane (making it not a real philosophical issue) the differences cannot be resolved without addressing ontological principles. As you yourself admit, ontology provides grounding. And philosophical difficulties are issues with principles, premises, which require analysis of the grounding, to resolve the differences. You might have noticed that discussions at TPF generally end up becoming disputes over ontological differences.
Quoting Janus
This claim could only be justified by begging the question. If you restrict your definition of "universe", to that which is studied by the empirical sciences, then the claim is true. But if you allow that "universe" extends to all those aspects of reality which are hidden from the empirical sciences (a very large part of reality as Wayfarer has proven), then your claim that "we have no more reliable, or even any other reliable, guide, to 'how the universe truly is" than science', must be blatantly false.
The falsity is due to the fact that we need to include within our guide to understanding how the universe truly is, all the aspects which are hidden from the empirical sciences. Therefore the guide must include evidence from the empirical sciences, but not be restricted to those principles, thereby employing a method which extends beyond them. A common example is "metaphysics", which by its name goes beyond physics. This allows that the knowledge derived from physics gets incorporated into a larger field, ?metaphysics", which would provide a more reliable guide to how the universe truly is, by using the knowledge derived from physics, other sciences, as well as other fields.
The divergence merely reflects that fact that the experimental results are counter-intuitive, which leaves it open for physicists themselves, who are not immune fomr having their own metaphysical preferences, to expound those preferences.
In any case science is not confined to physics, and I would also include everyday unbiased observation under the umbrella of science, since it is the basis upon which all conjecture and hypothesizing are founded.
Quoting Wayfarer
Nothing wrong with citing actual arguments, but presenting bare statements made by experts certainly seems like an appeal to authority.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Can you give an example of what the concept
other than what is either observable or the effect of something observable?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So you acknowledge that science is a guide to metaphysical speculation. Can you cite another?
Because physics is not ontology/metaphysics.
Physics tells many things about the natural world - all of which are best guesses - very GOOD guesses, thanks to the methodology that is truth-directed (verification, falsification, revision, supplanting). Ontology entails postulating general features of existence. The postulates of physicalism transcend physics, and are not contingent on any particular theories in physics. Falsifying a theory in physics has no bearing on the axioms of physicalism.
Example: Armstrong's "atomism" is an ontological claim that there is an irreducible bottom layer of physical reality. It is not based on atomic theory, quantum field theory, or string theory - but based on judgement against a vicious, infinite regress. i.e. it is based on the tools of philosophy, not science. If quantum fields are actually the ontological rock-bottom, that would be consistent with the ontological claim, but the ontological claim is not contingent upon it. (Furthermore, science could never demonstrate that an ontological bottom has been found).
Physicalism respects the discoveries of physics, and as such is a form of scientific realism, but it doesn't entail treating any specific findings in physics as an element of the ontology or as a set of assumed facts upon which it depends.
Physicalists do adopt the implication of physics that there are on laws - but based on it being a best explanation for the success of physics*, and respect for the epistemoligical basis of science.
I hope this helps you understand why it's incorrect to say that physics (that set of defeasible theories) cannot be considered the ontological ground that physicalism depends on. If physics were completed and perfected, then it would do so, but that's just an idealization; it's unrealistic to think that will ever happen*.
Confusion arises in discussions when the term "physics" is used to refer to this idealization. In my discussions, I try to be consistent with referring to "laws of nature" as the actual, ontological laws. When I discuss "laws of physics", I'm referring to current theory. Gaps in current theory (e.g. dark matter & energy; quantum gravity) are irrelevant to the ontology- they just demonstrate the incompleteness of physics. Similarly with theory revision: Newton got a lot right with gravity.
You also suggested that I claimed physicalism is "supported by an argument from 'the scope of physics'. I haven't said that. The scope of physics is the natural world. The scope of ontology is the totality of existence. Physicalists are philosophers who assert the physical world to BE the totality of existence, but it is not a conclusion derived from physics. Rather, it is a conclusion based on an absence of adequate evidence of anything else, and parsimony. Indeed, physicalists respect what physicists have learned about nature: physics provides a set of "facts" about the world that have stronger epistemic support than many other claims about what exists. But also, as I said earlier the postulates of physicalism are actually beyond the scope of science - so despite physicalism's effective scope being physical reality, it's scope of discourse transcends physics.
_____________
*Some physicalists, including Armstrong, suggest physics will eventually be completed. I am more pessimistic, because there are limits to what we can investigate empirically. My understanding is that string theory is close to being a complete physics- accounting for the quantum fields and gravity. But critics are correct in noting that it's not possible to test it empirically. Similarly with confirming some interpretation of QM.
Quoting Wayfarer
Ontology INCLUDES the set of all actually existing things, but it also includes theory about the structure of reality. Examples: 1) Armstrong's postulate that everything that exists is a "state off affairs", with 3 kinds of constituents 2) the postulate that laws of nature are relations between universals, account for causation and reflect a necessitation.
Quoting Wayfarer
It reflects a problem for science rather than a problem for physicalism. It's problematic for a physicalism that assumes science can and will answer all questons about the natural world but I noted my disagreement with that. I do not expect science to necessarily be able to answer every question about the physical world.
In principle, I'm open to a theory of mind that includes something inconsistent with physicalism. But I've seen nothing but possibilities being proposed that have no epistemological basis to support them. These unnatural possibilities aren't even put in the form of an explanatory hypothesis to entertain against natural ones. They simply entail something vauge existing that is undetectable/unanalyzable by science.
If undetectable/unanalyzable answers are reasionable to consider, this should include undetectable/unanalyzable physical possibilities- something that fits the physicalist paradigm: everything that exists is a state of affairs, causation is due to relations between universals, and causal closure. It would be different if I were singularly focused on philosophy of mind, but I'm interested in the broader metaphysical landscape.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think you mean "philosophical implications". The implication I see is paradigm failure. That alone doesn't falsify physicalism. I'm not rationalizing and demanding physicalism be proven logically impossible, because my position is based on Inference to Best Explanation. I would need to see a better explanation than physicalism.
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree that the physics only establishes the efficacacy of the calculations, but it does tell us something about the ontological nature of the system it describes, and nothing about it is inconsistent with physicalism. It's a strike against standard scientific realism (which assumes the model descriptions as accurate), but is exactly the point of ontic structural realism.
Quoting Wayfarer
So...you disagree, and you explained why you disagree, but you've given me no reason to change my mind- you have demonstrated no failure of treating it as paradigm. Neither did you respond to this:
Quoting Relativist
Quoting Wayfarer
The category mistakes involved conflating physics with physicalist ontology, and I did say that. More broadly, I said you didn't understand physicalism. I hope this lengthy reply helps to better understand physicalism and its relation to physics.
BTW, I'm sure I brought up Ontic Structural Realism before. I recall you having a more favorable attitude toward it vs standard scientific realism.
There is a huge part of the so-called "universe", dark matter, dark energy, etc., which is neither observable nor the effect of something observable. The effects of these are observable, but these are not themselves observable, nor are they the effect of something observable. We might hypothesize that they are the effect of spatial expansion or some such thing, but spatial expansion is not observable or the effect of something observable. From our observations, we conclude logically that there must be something (spatial expansion), which causes what we observe. This is what the theologists say about God, His effects are observable. but He is not Observable.
This common feature of "the universe", that there are thing which are not observable but have effects which are, I believe is due to the nature of time. The only things observable are things at the present, so all observation are past in time by the time they are noted as observed. However, there is a vast part of time, which is perhaps even bigger than the past, which is known as the future. The future is unobservable for the reason just stated. And, since the future consists of possibilities, this is not the effect of something observable, nor the effect of something observed.
Quoting Janus
No, science is not a guide to metaphysical speculation, just evidence to consider in metaphysical speculations. Both the successes and failures of science need to be considered objectively, and judged accordingly. Since it consists of both, and its parts must be judged, it cannot itself be the guide for that judgement. Metaphysical speculation is itself the guide, and intuition is what inspires it.
Lots of philosophical issues can be discussed without first establishing a common ontology. This includes discussions of epistemology and science.
[Quote]As you yourself admit, ontology provides grounding. [/quote]
Yes, but it's not always necessary to demonstrate how the issues map to the ontological ground. We usually just claim a supervenience relation.
When it IS necessary, each side can either choose to make a case for their ontology, or they can simply agree to disagree based on their respective background beliefs.
You are now saying science is not a guide, but you said this earlier:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
If the guide includes evidence from the empirical sciences then the empirical sciences are guiding metaphysical speculation. Intuition is always itself guided by the current state of knowledge or scientific paradigm. Intuition in unconstrained speculative free play can come up with anything that isn't a logical contradiction, so by itself is not a reliable guide at all. I don't prefer referring to it as intuition anyway, but rather as imagination?creative imagination invents hypotheses designed to explain what is observed?it's known as abduction.
The judgement is between 2 or more competing hypotheses, for the sole purpose of selecting one. And remember I have replaced my term "good reason" with "relevant information". This relevent new information may, or may not, change the ranking. Consider the auditory evidence of a second shooter of Kennedy: this new information doesn't change my relative ranking of the 2 hypotheses. In cases where it is a closer call, new relevant information could change the judgement.
To reiterate: modest Bayesianism does not entail assigning an absolute probability; rather: just a relative ranking.
[Quote][I think it is irrational to choose a hypotheses when there is strong evidence (good reason) which indicates that it is false.[/quote]
Semantics. I previously addressed this:
Quoting Relativist
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Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You seem to be mistakenly treating certainly level as a probability that can be calculated, and indicating the actual probability is unknown - because our knowledge is limited.
That's not what we're doing. We're just producing a relative ranking of the hypotheses based on whatever information is available.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Good description of what often occurs, but do you agree that it can be more rational to reevaluate the hypotheses (there need to be at least 2) than to "adjust and make an exception"? That's my point.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
There tends to be no viable alternative hypothesis to the then-current accepted theory. But it's more complicated than that. Refer to Kuhn's, "Structure of Scientific Revolutions"
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
How does the fact that there is an ontological ground to epistemolgy (invariably discussed as a supervenience relation) support your claim that physics can replace epistemology? Consider the relation between meteorology and the more fundamental science of thermodynamics and fluid dynamics - which obviously ground it - just one level down.. No one would suggest replacing meteorology with direct application of thermodynamics and fluid dynamics.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The context is that we're selecting a "best explanation" for a set of data that we are assumed to be facts, from a set 2 or more possible explanations that have been proposed. You still seem be treating this as traditional Bayesianism.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The observations you refer to are entirely within a temporal context, such that for any observed object, X, we observed a time (Tp) prior to its existence. So we can conclude that the state of affairs at Tp necessarily had the potential to produce X.
Your inductive inference applies to all cases in which an object comes into existence from a state of affairs in which it did not exist. It does not apply to an initial state of affairs (Si); because there was no prior time at which Si did not exist. There's no objective reason to believe an initial, uncaused, physical state of affairs could not have existed.
I have just conclusively shown that your argument is non-sequitur.
Quoting Relativist
But how can physicalism transcend physics? If physics is not relevant to physicallsm, then why describe such a foundational ontology as physical at all? Physical compared to what?
And if the irreducible bottom layer of reality cannot, even in principle, be identified by or with the theories of physics, then on what basis is it called "physical"? Armstrongs atoms may be a neat philosophical posit but unless theyre tied to some determinate content, why regard them as more than symbolic? And if theyre only symbolic, then the reality they possess is conceptual rather than physical.
And what, for that matter, is the supposed threat of infinite regress? If Armstrongs atoms were shown to be untenable, what regress would be entailed? It seems to me that invoking the specter of regress is simply a way to secure closure by stipulation to insist that there must be a final layer, whether or not physics ever finds one.
Quoting Relativist
How convenient!
Quoting Relativist
But surely the totality of existence includes human beings. You're not seeing the point of Chalmers critique:
Quoting Relativist
But it's important to grasp that this is not the meaning of the 'hard problem'. It's not the want of knowledge about the natural world. It's pointing to a matter of principle, not something which can be solved by the accumulation of further facts. In a way, the hard problem of consciousness is simply a rhetorical device: it is pointing out that no matter how sophisticated the objective understanding of consciousness, the first-person nature of experience (or existence) will always elude that description. That isnt a gap waiting to be filled its the structural blind spot of objectivist science. But I won't repeat myself, and thanks again.
Quoting Janus
Exactly as I said they are names applied to something not understood, nor observed, but the effects of them are observed. This is just like the theological "God", something not understood, nor observed, but the effects of God are observed.
Quoting Janus
I see no point to discussing ambiguity in the meaning of "guide". I think I adequately made my point.
Quoting Relativist
Of course, we discuss our philosophical differences. And if we proceed philosophically without differences its because our underlying ontological assumptions are compatible and there is nothing to establish.
Quoting Relativist
That's not what we've been discussing. The judgement is whether or not to continue with the acceptance of the hypotheses, physicalism, when there is new evidence (relevant information) which contradicts it. We have not been discussing alternatives. I maintain, that when the operating hypotheses is demonstrated as deficient, it is time to seek a new one.
Quoting Relativist
That judgement is irrational. The new evidence directly contradicts what you believe, yet you claim it does not change the degree of certainty in your belief. That, is being irrational, plain and simple.
Quoting Relativist
Again, you are making a strawman representation of our discussion, as if we are ranking competing hypotheses. We are not, we are considering the acceptability of one specific hypotheses, named as "physicalism". And, we are judging whether it is something to be believed, when we have "relevant information" which directly contradicts it.
Quoting Relativist
Why do you think there needs to be at least two? That's not what we are discussing. We are discussing the judgement of one hypotheses. The scientific method works to judge one hypotheses, with experimentation. There is no need for at least two. That is some arbitrary condition which you are trying to impose, because you have a model which operates in that way, but it's just a strawman model, not at all representative of real judgement in this sort of situation.
Quoting Relativist
That's not my claim, in fact it is the opposite of my claim. My claim is that believing in physicalism is believing that physics can replace metaphysics as the grounding for epistemology. And, I say that this is a false belief, not a true one.
Quoting Relativist
Good example. Metaphysics grounds epistemology, which grounds the sciences and physics. You (through the means of physicalism), suggest that we can take physics a few levels down, and replace metaphysics with the direct application of physics. Does your example help you to understand why physicalism is unacceptable?
Quoting Relativist
Strawman! We are judging one hypotheses, physicalism.
Quoting Relativist
There is no initial state of affairs. Any such initial state would be arbitrarily imposed, and would be a "physical condition", so this is irrelevant to the argument, and you are using it as an attempt to impose a physicalist premise.
Quoting Relativist
Yes there is a reason to believe this. The proposed "uncaused, physical state of affairs" is contrary to all the empirical evidence, which supports the inductive premise of causation. There is absolutely no empirical evidence which is contrary to this inductive premise. Therefore, that an "uncaused, physical state of affairs could not have existed" can be known with the highest possible degree of certitude.
Quoting Relativist
No, you have just presented me with an irrelevant and false proposition, that an initial state of affairs is required. The irrationality of an initial state of affairs, in the absolute sense, with no prior time, demonstrates that any proposed initial state, itself requires a prior cause. That is exactly the case with the proposed "Big Bang". It must be either reduced to a nonphysical mathematical "singularity" as the initial state (which is irrational because its a mathematical, nonphysical "state"), or else understood as having a prior cause, God or some other sort of universe creating mechanism.
I googled the definition of Transcend:
"to rise above or go beyond the limits of"
Each of the postulates of physicalism goes beyond what physics can properly do:
-identify the ontological structure of existents as states of affairs
-the ontology of universals: that they exist at all; that they exist immanently
-the ontological structure of laws (relations between universals); physics can identify instrumentalist methodology (equations). As I described, theoretical models are heuristics and/or metaphysical claims.
-that physical reality = the totality of reality.
Quoting Wayfarer
Axiomatic, but justified. The states of affairs (SOA) model is consistent and coherent, and entails a hierarchical structure such that complex SOAs are composed of lower level SOAs. Introducing additional, nonphysical, categories of existent is superfluous and unparsimonious.
[Quote]Armstrongs atoms may be a neat philosophical posit but unless theyre tied to some determinate content, why regard them as more than symbolic? And if theyre only symbolic, then the reality they possess is conceptual rather than physical.[/quote]
Because an ontological/metaphysical theory entails a theory of what exists. Compare to Thomist metaphysics which assumes every existent has an "essence". This is a postulate based on conceptual analysis- there SEEMS to be something essential to objects that is unique to them. Conceptual analysis is the basis for any ontology.
Nevertheless, someone who is agnostic to ontological theories, or outright rejects physicalism, could treat this ontology as symbolic- a paradigm to which they don't commit. This is the same sort of thing I had in mind regarding my ability to discuss philosophical issues within a paradigm that's inconsistent with physicalism. I can regard the paradigm as symbolic, but useful to considering the topic.
Quoting Wayfarer
An infinite regress of causes implies each effect can be accounted for by the immediately prior cause. This has 2 vices: 1) It entails an infinite past, because causation entails a temporal sequence. I have argued in other threads that this is mpossible 2) The infinite series (as a whole) is left unaccounted for.
Similarly with composition: every object that is examined is accounted for by simpler and simpler components. The absence of a bottom layer implies the series as a whole isn't accounted for, and it would be impossible for an infinite number of parts to assemble.
Quoting Wayfarer
How frustrating. For me.
My perspective: throughout this discussion I got signs that you didn't understand physicalism. Your questions conclusively prove I was correct- and imply none of your criticisms are relevant to me. Your falsifications fail because they are rooted in that lack of understanding.
Remember, I am not trying to convince you; you're trying to convince me. Only because you admitted that, I thought it might be worthwhile to take the time to answer your questions to help you understand. A remark like this suggests to me you aren't trying to understand, and are instead casting judgement, rooted in your own perspective.
Quoting Wayfarer
This portion of my response did not deal with Chalmer's claims - but I addressed it later in my response. Here, I was explaining the difference between physics and physicalism, and their relationship to each other. You have clearly misunderstood it, and the comment you reacted to was part of my explanation. Appropriate responses would be "ah, I get it now (at least partly)", or a follow-up question to get additional clarification if it still wasn't clear.
Quoting Wayfarer
My comment was a response to a specific issue you raised:
Quoting Wayfarer
I'll be blunt. You were attacking a strawman: a false view of physicalism that assumes "scientific descriptions" must possible for everthing. I went on to say, "I do not expect science to necessarily be able to answer every question about the physical world." I expanded on this in my subsequent 2 paragraphs.
I made additional comments that you didn't comment on, and asked you some questions you didn't answer.
You had complained that I hadn't adequately responded to all your objections, and had dismissively claimed "category error" and "strawman". I took that to heart and tried to give you more complete answers. This took a lot of time. So it's frustrating that you give no indication that you've understood anything I've said, and instead merely give me a subjective negative reaction. This is not an effective way to meet the objective you stated - which entailed making headway in convincing me.
So it seems like it's time to agree to disagree.
Thanks for clarifying. But this seems to sharpen the question rather than resolve it. If physicalism transcends physics in the sense you describe, then these postulates are not discoveries of physics but metaphysical commitments. In that case, why call the framework physical rather than simply metaphysical realism?
If the claim is that physical reality = the totality of reality, then the term physical is carrying a great deal of weight. But if what you mean by physical is not fixed by physics itself, then what anchors it? Otherwise, physicalism looks less like an ontology than a promissory note: asserting that whatever is real must fall under the heading of the physical, even when the meaning of physical is left indeterminate.
Ive already disputed the idea that universals are physical. Ive been researching it and found another philosopher, E J Lowe, who also disputes this idea from within an analytical perspective. Lowe rejects Armstrongs physicalist version. Armstrong insists that universals exist wholly in each of their instances so that redness is literally a physical constituent of each red object. Lowe argued this borders on incoherence: how can one and the same entity be wholly present in two places at once? He advocates a weak form of immanence, where universals are always instantiated but are not themselves located in space and time. Universals, in Lowe, are not reducible to particulars nor are they spatiotemporal. Thats why he says they are always instantiated but not literally in space and time. He goes on to argue on these grounds and other grounds that physicalism is incoherent.
Me, I say that universals can only be recognised by a mind. They are dependent on the minds ability to identify likeness etc. They are part of the intellectual apparatus of rational thought.
Quoting Relativist
That problem is not addressed by the assertion that at bottom, everything must be physical, especially in the absence of any notion of the physical that is stipulated by physics.
That is really all I have to say on the matter. I am not and will never be persuaded by physicalism.
Re Ontic Structural Realism - I dont much like their style. Same for much of analytical English-speaking philosophy, Armstrong, Lewis, Quine etc. Im interested in existentialism, phenomenology, non-materialist philosophy of mind, Buddhism and Eastern philosophy.
Quoting Relativist
Philosophy is critical. I too feel that criticism of the idealist ideas I put forward is based on their not being understood. Philosophical debates are often like that. But I stand by the criticisms Ive offered and I dont see them as having been rebutted.
In other words, physicalism claims that physics can go beyond what physics can properly do.
By contrast, contemporary physicalism has quietly shifted ground. It still borrows the authority of science, but without committing itself to whatever physics currently says about the world. Instead, it invokes the scientific worldview in a more nebulous sense, using scientific facts when they support its claims, but disclaiming any dependence on physics when they do not. The result is less a rigorous ontology than a posture of allegiance: a declaration that, whatever reality ultimately turns out to be, it will count as physical by definition. This maneuver preserves physicalism from refutation, but only by reducing its content to a loyalty oath.
Well, "materialism" seems to have been left behind. But probably, "scientism" is a better word for the modern form then, according to what you describe here. But for some reason, "scientism" has already developed negative connotations, and is generally frowned upon. So those who believe in this sort of ontology prefer to claim "physicalism" because this term has maintained some of that traditional acceptability acquired through that relationship with "materialism".
It's a shifting sea of names. because as that simplistic form of ontology gets exposed as insufficient, the believers adopt a new name, with minor alterations, in an attempt to cover over the insufficiencies.
Quoting Wayfarer
(Your first sentence is correct.)
Mathematical realism is less specific: a dualist could be a mathematical realist.
Quoting Wayfarer
The metaphysical system "physicalism" doesn't include a catalog of what exists. I don't think any metaphysical system does that, except for some particular existent, like God in Thomist metaphysics.
Physics identifies things that exist (to the extent that physics tells us something about what exists- per OSR). IMO, any metaphysical system would be suspect if it denied the findings of physics or the non-existence of the objects of ordinary experience. Perhaps an idealist would disagree, but that's another whole discussion.
So physicalism defers to physics the identification of what exists. IMO there's no epistemically superior means of doing so. That deference doesn't entail an ontological commitment to the specific things physics identifies.
Everything that physics theorizes to exist is causally interconnected. Physicalism is a thesis that the complete set of causally connected things comprise the totality of reality. It seems to me it is this interconnectedness that is the anchor.
The term "physicalism" is used largely for historical reasons. These are discussed in the SEP article on physicalism. Personally, I make sense of it by considering proper subsets of the sorts of things commonly treated as existing: spiritual/supernatural objects (e.g. angels), abstract objects, and physical objects. Physicalists deny the existence of the first two.
Quoting Wayfarer
That is the common issue that is brought up. There are 3 pushbacks:
1) if a property (e.g. redness) is just a single existent, it means each particular red object requires an ontic relation to that existent. This entails a more complex model of existents (i.e. it's less parsimonious).
2) it raises the question of "where" they exist. There's no location in the physical world for them, so one must (unparsimoniously) assume another type of existent - and there to be ontic relations that bridge to it from the physical world.
3) Multiple instantiations of a property is intuitive: we observe multiple objects that all exhibit redness, -1 electric charge, 90 degree angles, etc. And these properties seem both intrinsic and necessary to being the object that it is.
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm struggling to see how this differs from what I said. If Lowe believes properties are not particulars, then what are they? Armstrong says they are constituents of particulars. Particulars are reducible to simpler particulars, all the way down to the ground: atomic particulars/states of affairs which are irreducible. These atomic states of affairs still have all 3 sets of constituents (bare particular, intrinsic properties, relations to other particulars). How does Lowe account for them?
Quoting Wayfarer
Sure, they can only be "recognized" by minds, because recognition is a mental process. But surely the existence of universals is not contingent on being recognized by humans. Electrons had -1 electric charge before anyone recognized there were electrons and they each have this exact charge.
Are you are claiming that universals are nothing but abstractions of aspects of the things we perceive, measure, and theorize: existing exclusively in minds but having no ontological significance to the objects thenselves. That would be fine, but it's a different definition.
Quoting Wayfarer
I was explaining the GENERAL problems with some infinite regresses, in answer to your question: "And what, for that matter, is the supposed threat of 'infinite regress'?" Any metaphysics that entails a problematic infinite regress has this problem. It's a general issue in philosophy of mathematics.
Regarding the "absence of any notion of the physical that is stipulated by physics", I addressed that above. Again: I don't think any metaphysical theory should have a catolog of existents. They should catalog the types of things that exist in a way that divides all existents into subsets.
Quoting Wayfarer
My objective has never been to persuade you physicalism is true. My objective has been to demonstrate that it is not unreasonable to accept it. I know you will judge it negatively because it's inconsistent with matters important to you, but I hope you recognize that I have different philosophical concerns.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think you mean "refuted", as in proving to you that your position is unreasonable- which I never set out to do.
But I DID refute your flawed understanding of physicalism, and this results in dissolving your case against it to me. You would have to build a case in terms that are consistent with my view of physicalism. I'm not proposing you do this, and I recommend against it. Agree to disagree.
My one hope is that you have a bit more respect for my position after this exchange. I've never lost my respect for yours. I believe your objections are deeper than the details you've gotten wrong and that it's more related to your general world view.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't claim to understand it, but what would help would be some short description of a reasonable form of idealism. Not "Joe says this, Mike says that" and leaving it to the interested reader to explore further. I'm only mildly interested, not sufficiently to do that work.
.
But again, please understand what I see as the fundamental category error in this formulation. By casting the non-physical in terms of 'spiritual/supernatural objects', you are already framing it within the paradigm of objectivism - the assumption that whatever is real, is, or could be, an object of cognition. Notice the empiricist presuppositions in this attitude. This is a metaphilosophical point concerning questions about how philosophy itself is conceived.
This orientation toward what is objectively so is a distinct cognitive mode, one that shaped modern science and the so-called scientific worldview" (and, hence, so much of modern life). It begins with Galileos distinction between primary (measurable) and secondary (sensible) qualities, and with Cartesian dualism, which divided res cogitans from res extensa. A further division soon followed between natural and supernatural. The Charter of the Royal Society, for instance, explicitly forbade canvassing metaphysical questions, assigning them to the Churches, which then held enormous power.
These divisions can be summarized quickly, but they represent a major chapter in intellectual history (the subject of Edmund Husserl's posthumously published "The Crisis of the European Sciences"[sup]1[/sup]). The challenge is that we are so immersed in this orientation that we dont see it; it provides the spectacles through which questions are viewed. Philosophy, to my mind, means learning to look at those spectacles, not only through them.
All that in mind, the nature of being can be understood very differently. In phenomenological (and also Indian) philosophy, being is participatory: something we are always already enacting, not a detached object of analysis (even though objectivity has its place). Here, the subjectobject split is not the sole lens through which existence must be interpreted. And if nothing is said about what is spiritual, that might only be because, with Wittgenstein, there is 'that of which we cannot speak', but which is nevertheless of foundational significance in philosophy. But the upshot is, there are things that are subjectively real, that is, can only be known first-person, but which are as foundational as any purported 'atomic objects of cognition'. This is what we designate Being, which includes the irreducible fact of the subject to whom the objective world is disclosed.
Quoting Relativist
I think, again, this question is posed against the implicit division of subject and object, mind and world. And, again, this is so deeply knit into our way of being that it's very difficult to see it any other way. But my take on universals is that they are intrinsic to the way in which the mind assimilates and interprets sensory experience. Intellectual abstractions, the grasp of abstract relations and qualities, are what binds rational conceptions together to form coherent ideas. But these are neither 'in the world' nor mere pyschological constructs, they are universal structures of intelligibility disclosed through consciousness. (As you've mentioned Edward Feser's blog, see his Think, McFly, Think.)
Quoting Relativist
You've opened the door here to the fundamental question that arose with quantum mechanics, that of 'observer dependency'. And you can't defray that by claiming that this is only one of various competing interpretations. Even the competing interpretations are trying to account for the fact of observer-dependency, or show some way in which it can be discounted. And that, in turn, is necessitated by the uncertainty principle. The uncertainty principle doesnt necessarily imply no reality before observation, but it does mean that the classical assumptionthat particulars have determinate, observer-independent properties at bottomcant be sustained without qualification. What is real, is a range of possibilities expressed by the wave-function (?), which are condensed into a single value by registration or measurement (the so-called 'wavefunction collapse'[sup]2[/sup]).
So when you write that particulars are reducible all the way down to atomic states of affairs, youre really invoking a metaphysical picture inherited from classical physics. But precisely that picture is what quantum mechanics has called into question, forcing contemporary physicalism to uncouple itself from physics as such. Which, again, implies that Armstrong's 'atomic facts' are conceptual placeholders.
Quoting Relativist
While I certainly respect your contributions and the clarity and courtesy with which youve presented your position, I must respectfully disagree with the philosophy of physicalism.
Quoting Relativist
A'friend link' to my Mind-Created World on Medium.
Mind over Matter, interview with Bernardo Kastrup.
--------------------------------------------
1. How the untimely death of RG Collingwood changed the course of philosophy forever, Prospect Magazine, for insights into Ryle's attitude towards Husserl
2. The Timeless Wave of Quantum Physics, Wayfarer.
Quoting Relativist
In fact physics has got more rigorous in the sense of shifting the ontological burden from merely a materialist account to one that is instead fully structuralist. So abstract objects are now included. Physics speaks to both material and formal cause.
The old fashion dualistic notion of material being opposed to spiritual being has been upgraded. Matter has been dematerialised in physics. It is now raw potential. Pure possibility. A gradient of change.
The dualist complaint about physics was that it only spoke to inanimate matter lumps of stuff and that made it a story of pure contingency. Billiard balls clattering about mindlessly. The materialist view of nature was patently soul-less.
But physics was already riding mathematics to Platonia. Galileo, Descartes and Newton were significant precisely because they were identifying the fundamental symmetries that are the structures organising nature. The structures that turned the raw material potency into some globally necessary state of lawful order. The abstract objects shaping the material objects.
So the birth of materialism was really the birth of mathematical structuralism and the start of the dematerialising of the materialism which is in fact the lay-view of the "real world". The substantial and object-oriented view that is the way we see tables and chairs, billiard balls and falling feathers. The view that understands the world as lumps of stuff all the way down ... until one encounters atoms as the littlest lumps that can't be chopped any finer.
It is this lay-view of matter that got dissolved in conjunction with the maths of symmetry getting beefed up to provide a proper language for talking about the constraints of structure. Science progressed rapidly once it got this trick reducing matter to pure contingency and reducing form to the absolute logical necessity expressed by mathematical structure.
So the ontology of modern physics is pretty straightforward. It speaks of pure chance in interaction with absolute necessity. And this is the rigorous framework. And one that clearly encompasses everything causal that needs to be said as it spans the metaphysical gamut from chance to necessity.
Who needs a creating god when mathematical logic already enforces its absolute constraints on material possibility. And who needs a creating god when what could possibly deny the existence of chance and contingency?
How can possibility be made impossible except by some constraining hand. It doesn't need creation to exist. It needs limitation to clarify in what precise manner it exists. And mathematical constraint the natural logic of symmetry can do that job. Science has spent the last 500 years showing this.
So physicalism is the world as physics would see it. Materialism is an old hat term. Physicalism now clearly sees the world in hylomorphic fashion as an interaction between naked contingency and rigid constraint.
It all starts with a fluctuation. An action with a direction. The most naked material contingency already organised by the most fundamental dimensional constraint. A possibility actualised and revealing the wider structure necessary to its being. Causality tied up in a neat little package. Nothing further needed to account for what is going on.
This is why physicalism is a very problematic perspective. Mathematical axioms assume the existence of mathematical objects. This is implicit in set theory. But physicists do not identify a number, or a set, as an object which exists and which ought to be studied in the field of physics. Yet physicists use mathematics. Therefore physicists in the application of mathematics, assume the existence of mathematical objects, which they do not identify and study as existents.
This indicates that what you state as the approach of physicalism, "physicalism defers to physics the identification of what exists", is mistaken.
Quoting apokrisis
This is not true. Physicists do not work with pure chance and absolute necessity. That is simply your personal ontological interpretation of modern physics. It is not the ontology which actually underlies the work of physicists. In fact, the issues which are evident in the interpretation of quantum observations clearly indicate that there is no specific "ontology of modern physics". So how anyone portrays the ontology of modern physics is just a matter of personal preference.
Indeed!
[quote=Source;https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/context/quantum-mysteries-dissolve-if-possibilities-are-realities]...the common conception of reality is too limited. By expanding the definition of reality, the quantums mysteries disappear. In particular, real should not be restricted to actual objects or events in spacetime. Reality ought also be assigned to certain possibilities, or potential realities, that have not yet become actual. These potential realities do not exist in spacetime, but nevertheless are ontological that is, real components of existence.
"This new ontological picture requires that we expand our concept of what is real to include an extraspatiotemporal domain of quantum possibility, write Ruth Kastner, Stuart Kauffman and Michael Epperson.
Considering potential things to be real is not exactly a new idea, as it was a central aspect of the philosophy of Aristotle, 24 centuries ago. An acorn has the potential to become a tree; a tree has the potential to become a wooden table. Even applying this idea to quantum physics isnt new. Werner Heisenberg, the quantum pioneer famous for his uncertainty principle, considered his quantum math to describe potential outcomes of measurements of which one would become the actual result. The quantum concept of a probability wave, describing the likelihood of different possible outcomes of a measurement, was a quantitative version of Aristotles potential, Heisenberg wrote in his well-known 1958 book Physics and Philosophy. It introduced something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality.[/quote]
As Heisenberg says, this is broadly compatible with Aristotle's notion of matter as pure potentiality ('res potentia'). And once we admit potential as ontologically real, we also re-introduce the idea of inherent directionality a kind of natural teleonomy, putting back what Galileo's physics had taken away.
Quoting apokrisis
It's more than a 'dualist complaint', it was an inevitable consequence of the Cartesian/Galilean division. The resulting sense of the cosmos 'devoid of purpose' and 'product of blind forces' still holds a lot of sway in today's world. See for instance this current thread.
Quoting apokrisis
Who mentioned God?
Quoting apokrisis
Which is why hylomorphism lives on. By defending universals, D M Armstrong is invoking hylomorphic language, but he drains it of the very thing that makes hylomorphism distinct the irreplaceable role of form as intelligible order. For him, universals and laws are just physical constituents. That is a flattening of hylomorphism, as it fails to recognise the fundamental role of nous in recognising the forms. By contrast, pansemiotic or process views (including Whiteheads) retain the sense in which form, meaning, or constraint is not reducible to the physical but is constitutive of intelligible reality.
Quoting apokrisis
Hence the 'six numbers' of Martin Rees. The mother of all a priori's. Why? They were undeniably prior in the sense that they pre-condition everything that subsequently developed. Thats the anthropic cosmological argument in a nutshell - though it neednt import God into the picture, only the recognition that constraint precedes contingency.
But it does help to at least know the physics, wouldnt you agree?
Help who, the physicist?
Are you suggesting that the metaphysician ought to be instead a physicist, and that being a physicist instead of a metaphysician would make the metaphysician a better metaphysician?
So two guys who ran the risks of heresy charges and book bans unless they made a show of still being good Catholics. Their moves towards materialist explanations had to be publicly renounced. And then a little later, it was the Church on the back foot. Science was rolling and so all the things that materialism could never explain had to become the dualist defence. Science then kept on rolling and dualism has been pushed right out of the show.
Quoting Wayfarer
Who didnt when Descartes and Galileo were outraging the public by beginning to inject some mathematical and observational rigour into matters ontological?
Quoting Wayfarer
Wasnt Whitehead panpsychic? You are free to define pansemiotic how you like, but I place it firmly on the side of physicalism. Even if it is a physicalism designed to be a suitable ground for the biosemiotic view that accounts for life and mind.
Quoting Wayfarer
The triadic relation between the three Planck constants is more fundamental. And as a pure Unit 1 relation, it doesnt even need to come with some arbitrary number. Its number is simply the symmetry of the identity number - which is 1.
Quoting Wayfarer
But why does one thing always have to come before the next thing? That is the causal logic that is the root of so much ontological confusion. I am arguing - after Anaximander, Aristotle and Peirce - that constraints and contingency co-arise. Each is the others other. Or Paticcasamuppada as your Buddhist mates would say.
Nope. Im suggesting that if you want to talk sense about something, you need to start by understanding something about what it is.
Would you take much notice of a virgin telling you what sex is all about?
You're really not making any sense apokrisis. If you have an intelligent reply to my post, then please present it.
Until then I have only your demonstration that you know nothing about what physicists do. That is, your ridiculous claim that "the ontology of modern physics is pretty straightforward. It speaks of pure chance in interaction with absolute necessity".
And I already told you all this seven years ago now.
This "inherent directionality", within ontological potential, is why apokrisis' claim that physics speaks of "pure chance", and absolute necessity, is false. Physics never gets to "pure chance", nor do physicists assume such a thing. Apokrisis does, and some other cosmologists do, but that's not physics. Physicists have to deal with the reality of the less-than-ideal, which confronts them at every event. Pure chance and absolute necessity is never a part of that. The mathematics applied, of course, assumes ideals, but this does not equate with "the ontology of modern physics", it would be more properly called "the ontology of modern mathematics". But it's not common to base ontology solely in mathematical axioms, because these deliberately do not account for the reality of less-than-ideal physical world.
Are you claiming that some AI told you that Ontic Structural Realism is the ontology of modern physics? I think that AI needs some fine tuning in relation to its biases.
Again, just check out what I already told you seven years ago. Long before AI was around to deal with one's more mundane intellectual chores.
I brought up the "spiritual/supernatural" because there are common beliefs about it, and my purpose was to explain what it means to be physical.
So you question objectivism. I don't see any reason why I would. Sure, it's a backgound assumption, so add it to the set of physicalist postulates, and we still get a coherent theory. Coherence is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for truth.
Quoting Wayfarer
A meta-analysis would be great, but I don't think you're doing that. Rather, you're presenting
an alternative paradigm. I'll try to understand if it is coherent, but also if it answers more questions than it raises.
Quoting Wayfarer
How does our "participation" in existence differ from the participation of the sun? The sun has had a key role in the development of life on earth. Of course, it wasn't by choice.
Do you objectify the sun? Does it exist independently of you? It's not clear if the question is answerable in your paradigm.
Quoting Wayfarer
All paradigms (spectacles) are interpretive frameworks, including a paradigm of "participatory existence".
Quoting Wayfarer
The term, "subjectively real" seems problematic. The "contents" of my mind (my mental states) are objectively real - but known only to me. If I'm interpreting you correctly, you are simply suggesting the converse of objectivism. I'm waiting to hear some epistemic virtues, besides "possible".
Quoting Wayfarer
One must assume the "spiritual" exists in order to consider it of significance. I get it, that you referred to it being foundational to philosophy- but in that respect, philosophy's foundation was a product of its time. It's moved on, for good reasons. I gather that you're challenging the direction it took, but swimming against the current is extremely challenging.
Quoting Wayfarer
I've previously read the Feser article. The general problem I have with it is that he framed thinking in a paradigm incompatible with materialism, and then showed how it's incompatible with materislism.
The paradigm is potentially useful, and probably coherent - but it didn't help me understand your stance on universals. I get it, that the abstractions aren't in the world (outside our minds) and you regard this mental aspect as irreducible, but the concept of each universal has something to do with the world outside ourselves - does it not? I claim that the universal "90 degrees" that I conceptualize is exhibited in the walls of my room. The abstraction is distinct from the walls that exhibit it, but it describes an aspect of the walls- and this same as aspect is exhibited in many places. This exhibition/instantistion is omitted from your account.
Quoting Wayfarer
No. The interpretations account for the measurements. Referring to this as "observer dependency" implies there's something special in the relation between a human observer and the quantum system being measured. The more objective description is "entanglement" - which occurs when a quantum system interacts with a classical object.
Quoting Wayfarer
I disagree with your claim that "what is real is a range of possibilities". The possibilities you refer to are predictions of what will be measured, when complementary properties (like position and momentum) are measured. What is real is the quantum system. Were there no entanglements with a classical object (such as occurs with a measurement) the system would continue down the deterministic path of its wave function.
This does imply there's an aspect of reality that seems inscrutable: what is happening when entanglements occur. Is the wavefunction collapsing? Is there a branching to many worlds? Are there remote, hidden variables? All we can do is engage in metaphysical speculation.
Quoting Wayfarer
Again: no. Physicalism doesn't depend on particles being the ontological ground. According to current physics, quantum fields are more fundamental than particles. Quantum fields fit the state-of-affairs model: they are particulars with properties and relations to other quantum fields.
One more thing: you imply that there's some consensus on some particular metaphysical model (among physicists? Among philosophers?) I sincerely doubt that. I know it's not true of philosophers - a majority embrace, or lean toward, physicalism.
The fact that the language of mathematics treats abstractions as "existing" does not entail that they do.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
A physicist making a claim about the ontological status of mathematical abstractions is doing metaphysics, not physics. It's a question that cannot be settled by empirical evidence or scientific methodology.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Agreed.
It is true that Descartes had to forego the publication of some of his works for fear of religious persecution, and that the trial of Galileo was arguably the marker of the scientific revolution. But I dont think that the Cartesian division that I referred to was solely a result of those political pressures. Another major impetus was epistemological, with Galileos recognition of the importance of the Platonic dianoia and with his identification of the so-called primary attributes of bodies - those attributes being just the ones ideally suited to his new physics. Obviously a contestable argument, but this division is where the pervasive notion of the purposelessness of matter (and hence the Cosmos) originated. Meaning, purpose and intentionality was 'subjectivized' with the external world being conceived in purely mechanical and quantitative terms.
[quote=Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, Pp 35-36]The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. [/quote]
But youre spot on in saying that the fear of religion was a factor. And it remains a motivation for the continual re-definition of physicalist explanations in light of the implausibllty of lumpen materialism, whilst trying to avoid the hazards of anything that sounds 'spiritual'.
Quoting Relativist
I understand that - what is physical is defined in contrast with or distinct from what is supernatural or spiritual. That's a part of my point - it is an aspect of the 'Cartesian division' which I've already referred to. I'm trying to explain what is wrong with the expresssion 'spiritual/supernatural objects' by saying that terminology comes from a kind of conceptual confusion which can be traced back to Descartes' 'res cogitans' ('thinking thing'). The attempt to objectify or think of 'the spiritual' (whatever it may or may not be) in such objective terms is a category error (which Gilbert Ryle also said in Concept of Mind, in relation to Descartes.) There is no objective existent which corresponds with 'spirit' because (again whether it is real or not) it transcends the subject-object division. (Which is why mystical practices are aimed at deprecating the sense of 'otherness' or self-identification which characterises egoic existence.)
Quoting Relativist
The sun, to our knowledge, is not a rational sentient being, as are we.
The idea of participatory ontology is part of cognitive scientist John Vervaeke's roadmap. There are four ways of knowing: propositional, perspectival, procedural and participatory (ref.)Participatory knowledge is the knowledge of what its like to occupy a role in your environment or relationships. Vervaeke considers this to be the most profound of the four types of knowledge. It involves being in a deep, transformative relationship with the world, participating fully in something that is wider than you.
It is not just knowing about, but knowing through active engagement and transformation within specific contexts or environments. It shapes and is shaped by the interaction between the person and the world, influencing ones identity and sense of belonging.
This kind of knowledge is experiential and co-creative, often seen in the dynamics of relationships, culture, and community participation.
A large part of Vervaeke's analysis is how our immersion in propositional knowiedge, at the expence of other forms of knowing, results in just that sense of separateness and division, which, I would argue, philosophy proper is aimed at ameliorating (for which see Pierre Hadot's writings on philosophy as a way of life).
Of course, this is all light years away from David Armstrong's physicalism. I know, he was Head of Department where I studied undergrad philosophy. (Can't speak highly enough however of Associate Prof, Keith Campbell, who's 'Philosophy of Matter' course was a highlight of my degree studies.)
Quoting Relativist
You're telling me! :rofl:
Quoting Relativist
The 2022 Physics Nobel was about this. Indeed, observer dependency could be rephrased more precisely as measurement-dependency or interaction-dependency - but it still marks a break from naïve objectivism (where objects are assumed to have definite properties regardless of measurement).
The Nobel presentations also did not try to resolve what real means in the sense of ontology. The experimental results deepen the mystery, and many interpretations still vie for supremacy.
And then, there's the all-too-obvious point that all such measuring devices and instruments are extensions of human sensory abilities. 'The apparatus has no meaning unless the human observer understands it and interprets its reading,' as Schrödinger put it.
Quoting Relativist
Of course it does. But again I'm trying to draw attention to the implied understanding in your framing of the issue, of the separateness of mind and world. Universals, in the medieval account, are the way in which the intelligible features of the world are absorbed by intellect. As I put it in Idealism in Context:
So, participatory knowledge, again. The way in which this type of realism fell out of favour, to be replaced by nominalism and empiricism, is the subject of a fascinating book, The Theological Origins of Modernity, M A Gillespie. And that's also related to epochal changes in consciousness.
I know there's a lot to take on in all of this, but your questioning is causing me to recap what I've been studying. I know it's very different to the Anglo analytic philosophy.
Quoting Relativist
Thats precisely the issue: the category states of affairs is elastic enough to accommodate whatever physics happens to throw up. Its not doing explanatory work so much as retrofitting itself to whatever the latest theory says exists.
Utter bollocks. But go ahead and back your assertion up with the argument that might sustain it. :up:
Quoting Relativist
You are not sounding sufficiently familiar with either the metaphysics or the physics. But prove me wrong if you like.
You confuse a sense of humour for anger. Perhaps it's not a socially acceptable form of humour, but how does poking fun at someone, or ridiculing them, imply anger to you?
Quoting apokrisis
That statement really doesn't support your case. And repeating the same assertion you made seven years ago only indicates your unwillingness to adapt, and that your prejudice is well entrenched.
You are simply assuming the reality of the mathematical ideals which physicists apply (symmetries etc.). And you show complete disregard for the fact that the world which physicists apply these ideals to, reveals itself through empirical observation, to be fundamentally incompatible with those ideals. This has been pointed out to you many times, but you continue in ignorance.
it's just another form of physicalism, which by its very nature, ignores large tracts of empirical evidence, in an attempt to stuff the square peg (reality) into the round hole (physicalism).
Quoting Relativist
Are you saying that the axioms of mathematics are irrelevant to the meaning of mathematical symbols, that mathematicians can interpret the rules however they want?
Quoting Relativist
But you said explicitly ""physicalism defers to physics the identification of what exists". Therefore you (as physicalist) are assigning to physics, the responsibility of judging whether mathematical objects exist or not.
If you now claim that the physicist steps outside the boundaries of one's discipline, into metaphysics, in doing this, and ought not do this, then this implies that physicalism is absolutely incapable of making that judgement. The metaphysician who is physicalist leaves that judgement to the physicist to make, but then admits that the physicist is not qualified to make that judgement.
Quoting Relativist
i don't see how you can agree with me on this point, yet still believe that "physicalism" is the best ontology. By admitting that there is not one single ontology which supports physics as its grounding, you also allow that "physicalism" as an individual ontological base, will have internal incompatibility. That implies incoherency between various factions, but intrinsic within the overall "physicalism". Don't you think it would be better to choose one or the other form of physicalism, and adhere solely to those principles to avoid incoherency, or even better, to avoid physicalism altogether?
This actually relates directly to what you said above, about "the language of mathematics". We commonly allow interpretive variance in relation to mathematical axioms, as if interpretation is irrelevant. This allows for a wider range of applicability, that's what intentional ambiguity is useful for, a wider range of interpretation, therefore extended applicability. But it is ambiguity, and ambiguity is problematic when it comes to grounding. i suggest that you consider that this ambiguity contributes to the fact that there is a wide range of incompatible ontologies which consider themselves each to be a form of physicalism. This is because there is a range of different ways we can interpret the axioms which are indispensable to our understanding of the physics of the world.
See the part in bold, above. My assertion was modest: an initial state of affairs is possible. Your claim required it to be impossible: it was inductive inference, so treating it as an ironclad truth committed the Black Swan fallacy. By presenting an alternative you hadn't considered, I conclusively proved your conclusion false. You have now attempted to prove there to be an unrelated reason to deny the possibility of an initial state, to rationalize your error:
[Quote]The irrationality of an initial state of affairs, in the absolute sense, with no prior time, demonstrates that any proposed initial state, itself requires a prior cause.[/quote]
Now you're attempting to prove an initial, physical state is impossible based on determinism (the premise that every state of the universe was caused by a prior state). Determinism in the universe is a consequence of natural law (e.g. thermodynamics, among others). If you were to claim that natural law necessitates prior causes for every physical state then you would be committing the fallacy of composition: assuming that a principle (or law) that apply to parts also apply to the whole. So you have to depend on metaphysical law. Let's examine.
It is conceivable that there is metaphysical law that mirrors determinism, so we should agree that it is conceptually possible. Something that is conceptually possible is a candidate for being metaphysically possible. However, an initial state is also conceptually possible: we can conceptualize something just existing by brute fact*. So an initial state is at least a conceptual possibility, and therefore also a candidate for being metaphysically possible.
So we have two contradictory metaphysical claims. Both are conceivable, neither is provable (short of making additional assumptions*), but one must be false. Reasoning can take us no further - so you can't rationally claim to show an initial state is metaphysically impossible.
I could go further and show that an infinite past is logically impossible, but it's not necessary since I've already thoroughly refuted your claim.
BTW, An uncaused, initial state of affairs does not rule out God. An intentional creator is logically and conceptually possible*.
[Quote]That is exactly the case with the proposed "Big Bang". It must be either reduced to a nonphysical mathematical "singularity" as the initial state (which is irrational because its a mathematical, nonphysical "state"), or else understood as having a prior cause, God or some other sort of universe creating mechanism.[/quote]
Your understanding of the big bang theory is flawed. The theory of the big bang is based on general relativity: the size of the (currently) visible universe approaches zero at increasingly earlier states. So there's a mathematical limit of 0 size and infinite density. This entails a mathematical singularity - from which physicists infer general relativity breaks down. They also note that below a certain radius, quantum effects would dominate. This is currently unanalyzable because there is no accepted theory that reconciles general relativity and quantum mechanics.
There are a variety of hypotheses about "pre-big bang" conditions, and what laws would apply. At this point, it is impossible to know, but your claim is a contrivance to "prove" what you already believe.
________________
* If you are schooled in other deistic arguments, you will next claim that brute facts are metaphysically impossible. If you choose to do that, please make an effort to identify the metaphysical assumptions you are making. Every deistic argument depends on metaphysical assumptions, and this is why it is impossible to prove God's existence - those assumptions can always be denied; they cannot be proven. The same is true of trying to prove God's non-existence. I recognize this, and that's why I defend my beliefs as an inference to best explanation.
You responded to one of my posts with a set of unsupported assertions that were contrary to things I had said. Now you expect me to prove you wrong. I'm not playing that game.
If your intent was to simply state disagreement, consider it duly noted. If you'd like to defend your claims, feel free. Otherwise we can just agree to disagree.
Don't be so touchy. I simply pointed out that physics does deal in "abstract objects and physical objects" and so physicalists as those committed to a metaphysics of natural causes mostly only deny the existence of "supernatural objects".
I then explained myself as to what I meant. Where you are speaking about objects, I would instead talk about causes. Or even better, the modal distinction between chance and necessity.
So physics combines the absolute abstract necessity of the laws of symmetry with a notion of materiality that is as reduced as much as possible to pure contingency. And this is the approach that has worked out spectacularly.
Physicalism is not materialism as such. It is the deflation of materialism that Aristotle first proposed as a metaphysical-level argument in his hylomorphic theory of substantial being.
Talk of "abstract objects and physical objects" is misleading as any kind of object is based on the idea of the substantial being that physicalism as a naturalistic account is meant to be deflating. If you call yourself a materialist, you are already losing. If you want to make sense of being a physicalist, you do this by showing you accept the reality of mathematical structure in combination with the matching reality of the degrees of freedom that a global state of contraint leaves contingent or undefined.
Hence why quantum physicists joke about operating under the Totalitarian Principle. "Everything not forbidden is compulsory". This gets at the structural realism that has become the basic ontological commitment of the physicist.
For instance, if special relativity constrains all quantum action under Poincare invariance, then a great deal is forbidden in terms of vacuum fluctuations. And yet also, contrariwise, absolute freedom is then granted to the gauge symmetries available within that global state of SR constraint. Under quantum field theory, you can have SO(3) symmetry broken down into SU(2). And if reality can break in that fashion, it must do. Which is lucky for us as we can exist. There can be quantum fields organised by SU(2) that start spitting out fluctuations which become the kind of fundamental matter described by the Standard Model.
I mention Ontic Structural Realism as now the fact of metaphysics catching up with the physics and excitedly explaining the modal distinction of chance and necessity on which this physicalism stands.
Folk may have the impression that physics exists to cash in the metaphysics of Greek atomism. And to be fair, that is what really inspired Newton and his mates.
But this was just a stepping stone. Now physics is firmly based on the hylomorphism of symmetry and fluctuation. Structures of constraint and the degrees of freedom they also have no choice but to form. Or the physics of relativity coupled to the physics of the quantum.
A coupling that seems the new mystery. But then again, only if you make the metaphysical mistake of expecting ancient atomism to apply to the description of gravity and not step back to think about the Planck scale in properly hylomorphic terms.
Why Our Modern Worldview Limits Your Understanding of Reality
[hide="Reveal"]The dominant framework of the Middle Ages divided reality between the natural (governed by space, time, and causality) and the supernatural (a domain populated by God, angels, demons, and metaphysical powers transcending the material world).
But the Enlightenment rejected this dichotomy because they claimed it undermined their attempts to do science (make sense of the world), conduct ethics, and practice politics.
They proposed that the natural is all there isbut they didnt realize that they merely traded one distorting framework for another (which now silently constrains how we understand ourselves and the world).
Let me explain:
When the Enlightenment rejected the supernatural/natural dichotomy, they treated the supernatural not as false in a specific way, but as ontologically irrelevantas a category that had lost its ability to do explanatory work. In other words, not real.
From two realms, one was chosen: the natural.
But the postmodernists saw a fundamental flaw in this rejection:
The Enlightenment framework simply replaced that dichotomy with a whole gridlocked grammar of its own dichotomies.
The supernatural/natural was replaced with subjective-objective, fact-value, is-ought, theory-data, measurement-meaning, analytic-synthetic.
What the postmodern critique reveals is this:
How can you reject the supernatural/natural dichotomy while running yourself on the basis of all these unquestionable dichotomies that you assert as intrinsically and necessarily so?
The problem with these dichotomies is that they constrain us to experience the world in a particular way.
They become the unexamined structure through which we interpret experience, including our understanding of religion.
Take for example Stephen Jay Gould's notion of "Non-Overlapping Magisteria" (NOMA):
Gould claimed he had solved the problem of the relationship between religion and science.
His proposal:
Science is about facts; religion is about values. Since the two occupy entirely distinct domains, they cannot conflict. They can't possibly challenge each other.
Isn't that wonderful?
But Gould is only presupposingnot justifying, not even explicitly referencing:
Hes invoking the fact/value dichotomy as if it were a given.
He's just [s]seeing[/s] looking through this dichotomy.
And there are profound problems with this supposed clarity:
If the world is so cleanly divided how is it that nowadays ideas emerge (like Richard Dawkins claim) that every cell is a map of its environment, running on the same patterns and principles?
What he's pointing to is the ancient idea of microcosm and macrocosmthat the structure of the world is mirrored in the structure of the self.
This challenges the idea that the self is somehow sealed off from the world in subjective isolation. It suggests a profound fit between organism and world.
Or consider Karl Fristons proposal that you are a model of the world:
Your cognition is not merely representational, but enactive. Your brain and body do not passively mirror reality; they are dynamically coupled to it.
So how is this coming to the fore in a world divided, according to all these dichotomies?
This question points to the problem that arises when dichotomies are taken to be features of your worldviewas if they disclose the very structure of reality and the limits of what can be known.
One of the most prominent is the fact-value splitand it leads to what William Desmond called default atheism.
[quote=About John Vervaeke; https://vervaekefoundation.org/about-us/] For 28 years, cognitive scientist Dr. John Vervaeke has given his life to pioneering the scientific study of wisdom and transformation. His discoveries blend ancient and modern ways of knowingbringing together philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, information processing, linguistics, and studies of religion.
His Awakening From the Meaning Crisis series has earned him global notoriety and his academic work has gained the respect of the scholarly and scientific community. His lectures and discussions have been viewed by millions.
This cognitive explanation of meaning-making has attracted leaders in many disciplines to the work. His teachings have served as a clarion call, around which practices are being honed and communities are being built that are having a proven ability to bring transformation and meaning to many.[/quote][/hide]
Quoting apokrisis
From what Ive read, ontic structural realism is the attempt to rescue scientism from the wreckage of materialism. It has no interest in the nature and plights of existence as lived, but only in the abstract representation of physical forces. Its like the Vienna Circle 2.0.
I'm well aware of how you read things. Science is always scientism. Nature must include the supernatural. Plug in the algorithm and print out the conclusion without further thought.
Well dichotomies do disclose the limits of what can be the case. And fact-value is not a well-formed dichotomy. It is just a broken dualism.
Idealism is fatuous as it imagines the world made perfect under a set of guiding values like good, truth, beauty, the divine. But what kind of plan is that? How can monotonic personal values be turned into real world facts? What social or ecological structure what natural structure could implement this hope?
Sure, you can speak of the aspiration. But where is the delivery, the execution? If you listen to idealists, their idea of a plan is to either wait until you die and get transported up to Heaven, or else undergo some form of ego-death down here on Earth. Everyone stop everything you are doing and cease being a striving individual engaged with the daily business of living. Meditate to medicate.
In practice, only pragmatism works at all. Steering some balance between complementary limits. Formulate a system of values that is dichotomistically framed. One judged by the facts that are its outcomes. The facts that you then either want to leave alone or the facts you want to think about how to change.
Idealism points the mind off into the never-never. Placeless notions of perfection. Pragmatism is what lives down here on the surface of the Earth. Focus on the dichotomies we need to negotiate and we can come up with plans based on reason and evidence.
Ever read Schopenhauer? Yours is the man-in-the-street version of idealism, which is 'the hope that everything will turn out for the best'. Idealism properly understood is the mainstream of Western philosophy, beginning with Plato. It understands mind as fundamental to existence, not as a material constituent but as the faculty through which and by which whatever we are to know is disclosed. Your attitude embodies just the false dichotomy that Vervaeke is describing, between 'pragmatist physicalism and unrealistic idealism'. In reality, idealist philosophy is perfectly capable of both realism and pragmatism, where that is called for, but it also sees something beyond the physical.
The caricature of idealism as 'placeless notions of perfection' is simply false. Schopenhauer, for example, was not an optimist but a pessimist, yet still an idealist in the sense that the world is representation, grounded in will. Likewise, Kants transcendental idealism or Hegels absolute idealism were not about escaping into Never-Never Land but about showing that reality is only intelligible because it is already structured by reason.
Pragmatism doesnt escape this. William James and C S Peirce both recognised that our practices of inquiry are already shot through with valuestruth, coherence, what works. Thats why the supposed factvalue dichotomy is broken: there are no 'brute facts' apart from a horizon of meaning in which they matter. In fact, Peirce himself appears in encyclopaedia entries under the heading of "objective idealism" a fact you always reject because it doesnt suit the physicalist attitude you want to buttress with selective borrowings from his philosophy.
So what youre doing is just restating the very dichotomy Vervaeke critiques. Youre setting up 'pragmatism vs. idealism' as if they were exclusive alternatives, whereas the real point is that the framework of such dichotomies is what constrains thought in the first place. They are poles in a dialectic, not exclusive and exhaustive truth-claims.
That does not affect the argument. You just switched terminology from the existence of a physical thing, to a "state of affairs". By the inductive principle, the potential for each "state of affairs" is prior in time to that state of affairs. And, it needs an actual cause. Therefore even the proposed "initial state of affairs" has an actual cause which is prior to it.
Apokrisis avoids the cosmological argument by claiming that an actual physical state of affairs can come into existence from infinite possibility, as some sort of symmetry breaking. But this is illogical to believe that something actual could all of a sudden pop out of infinite possibility, a random fluctuation could suddenly occur in an infinite symmetry.
The nature of possibility is that each distinct possibility is possible. In infinite possibility each must be equally probable to allow that all are possible. Therefore not one could ever come into existence over another unless something selects, and actualizes one rather than the others. This is the issue, an actuality which causes one rather than the others is necessary. If possibility was infinite, then every possibility would be equal in that sense, and not one actual state of affairs could ever arise over the others, because that infinite possibility denies any actuality, and an actuality is required as cause.
Quoting Relativist
You haven't presented any alternative. You only irrationally denied the inductive logic as black swan fallacy. However, there is no black swan fallacy here, because all experience and all physical evidence points to the truth of the premise. I agree that we can never know anything with absolute certainty, as you've been arguing, but this inductive conclusion we know with the highest degree of certainty of anything. You could argue that all knowledge concerning the physical world falls to the black swan fallacy, but you've already denied extreme skepticism, indicating that we can believe some facts. So if you reject this inductive premise, you're a hypocrite, rejecting it only because you do not want to face the reality of the conclusion it produces.
Quoting Relativist
This is false. We have an idea of what "existing" means. And, it is derived from our observations of the physical world. If we move to "conceptualize something existing by brute fact", then we violate, or contradict the meaning of "existing" which is supported by observations of our world.
Of course one might stipulate, like in the case of mathematical axioms, what "existing" means, and proceed to a conceptualization of something which exists simply because it is posited as existing, but what good would that do? This conceptualized existing thing, which exists because it is posited as existing by brute fact, would be something completely distinct and unrelated to the actual physical existence which we know. That is the problem with the difference between axiomatized ideals, and the real physical world, which 've been describing.
How is that ideal "something existing by brute fact" in anyway useful to this argument? It's like saying that you can posit a "possible world" which is completely different from the actual world, and use this to refute my description of the actual world. But this possible world is completely irrelevant, unless you can demonstrate some relation. That's the thing with fiction, we can make up whatever we want, including something which exists just by brute fact. But the fiction is irrelevant to our knowledge of the actual world, until you can show it to have some bearing.
Quoting Relativist
Again, this is false. Yes, we have two contradictory metaphysical claims. However, mine is proven through reference to the actual physical world, and the strongest inductive principle which we can know. Yours is just a fictitious "possible world" which has no bearing on our actual physical world, which you only proposed as an alternative to mine because you are afraid to face the reality of the actual world.
Quoting Relativist
Your supposed refutation is like this: I can imagine a possible world which is completely different from your description of our actual world. Therefore your description of our world lacks the necessity required to be a true description, and your argument based on this descriptive premise is thereby refuted as unsound.
What you actually need to do to prove that the premise is untrue, is to demonstrate how it is inconsistent with the actual world. Thinking up an imaginary world which is different from my description, and claiming that the actual world could be like this instead of like my description, does not show my premise to be untrue.
Quoting Relativist
i don't see the flaw. You've just said almost the very same thing as me in a different way. The mathematical singularity is the mathematical ideal i referred to.
As always, you confuse epistemology with ontology. There is what is and then how we could know.
Putting the two together is pragmatism/semiosis. Pulling them apart into a realm of ideas and a realm of materials is dualism.
And you keep leaning on semiotics and believing it is leading you to idealism. You see it as a sword to smite materialism.
But no. It is the sword to smite Cartesian dualism. So time to learn how to grasp its handle rather than grab it by the blade.
Quoting Wayfarer
As a pragmatist, I can speak to epistemic method. And as a semiotician, I can then speak to the way that cashes out as my ontic commitments. They become related as two sides of the one coin.
You dont seem to get the neat logic of what Peirce was actually up to here. He fixed the confusion that you keep reverting to.
Quoting Wayfarer
Clearly Im not. At least I am certainly clear and you are not as yet. You are confusing pragmatism for materialism as idealism demands that as its perfect enemy. Pragmatism did the other thing of subsuming both camps into its broader holism.
Putting the two together is ambiguity and equivocation.
Quoting apokrisis
Peirce, like Wittgenstein whom some say derived ideas from Peirce, was a master of ambiguity.
I think this interpretation is really a symptom of the old Cartesian division between mind and world, self and other. We inherit, both innately and culturally, the sense of being a private self inside the body facing an external world of objects. Within that picture, subjective ends up meaning personal, private, even arbitrary, while objective means whatever any observer can check third-person.
But what I mean by subjective is not the merely personal. It refers to the structures of experience through which reality is disclosed to consciousness what phenomenology calls ipseity, or subject-hood. Every sentient being is a subject of experience in this sense. The personal is whats idiosyncratic to me alone, but subjectivity is foundational and shared. Without it, there could be no experience of reality at all. But we tend not see it, because it is the assumed endogenous background to everything we say and do.
Quoting apokrisis
Theres no need to cast this in terms of swords and smite. I appreciate that you pointed me toward biosemiotics in the first place; thanks to your contributions, Ive read a bit, including Marcello Barbieris Short History of Biosemiotics. What stood out to me is that biosemiotics is not a monolithic discipline. Barbieri distinguishes between at least three schoolsCopenhagen, Tartu, and Code biologyeach of which interprets the relation between symbols and physics differently. Hoffmeyer emphasizes semiosis as an emergent property of life, Barbieri stresses codes as rules not derivable from physics alone.
Thats why I dont see semiotics as simply a sword for idealism. What it shows is that meaning, coding, and interpretation cant be captured by physical causation on its own. That opens a space where physicalism doesnt have the last word, and where the epistemic/ontological split really matters. And phenomenological biology is also significant, with the way that it identifies the emergence of intentional actions in biology as the ground of 'ipseity' or what becomes fully developed in h.sapiens as the sense of self. All of that kind of thinking can be understood as naturalist without necessarily being physicalist. That is the province of enactivism or embodied cognition, which I'm sure you're familiar with, and which I think has at least an idealist element in it, in recognising the ineliminable role of the subject.
On the contary. You assumed the burden of proof when you said:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
An "irrefutable proof" can't simply establish that the conclusion is possibly true; it must show that the conclusion is necessarily true. My burden is easy: I merely need to show that one of your premises is possibly false.
If you don't understand that, then you don't understand logic.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
By "state" or "state of affairs", I am referring to the the totality of existence at a point of time. This would include all physical things and all gods (if they exist). What I've shown is that: it is possible that there was an initial state of affairs even if no gods exist.
You now claim an initial state of affairs "needs" an actual cause. Your burden is to show it logically impossible for something to exist uncaused. You can't. You're simply assuming it. I noted that deistic "proofs" depend on unproveable metaphysical assumptions.Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
And to think: you called ME a "dimwit".
If only white swans have been seen, one might infer that only white swans exist. But it's fallacious to conclude it is impossible for other colors of swans to exist. This is known as "the problem of induction
I profess to be a "law realist": that laws of nature actually exist, and this explains why we see regularities in nature. But law realism is a metaphysical hypothesis; I do not claim it is proven by the evidence - I only say that I judge it to be the best explanation of the evidence. I don't know how you account for the regularities in nature, but however you do- it can only be hypothesis.
Quoting Metaphysician UndercoverThat is mathematically incorrect. An infinite set of possibilities could fit any probability distribution.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
There are various ideas about what it means to exist. [B]My position[/b] is that existence entails objects which have intrinsic properties and that has relations to all other objects (at least indirectly). A brute fact initial state would have properties that accounted for its potential to develop into subsequent states of affairs. IOW: it initiates (=causes) the subsequent causal chain that you misinterpret.
I bolded "my position" to highlight the fact that I not claiming to prove to you I'm necessarily correct. But you need to prove my stated position to be impossible, given that you claimed to be able to prove God's existence.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Nope. The initial state is causally linked to everything that exists.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
An initial state is a black swan: it falsifies your inductive inference, and you haven't proven an initial state impossible.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Then watch this short video by cosmologist Sean Carroll:
https://youtube.com/shorts/uDB0_oIDUds?si=I6d3GYd3nhDtPKMC
No discipline involving inquiry could be monolithic. It has to be riven at every scale by its dichotomies - its dialectical factions.
So by the time you can name the first dozen such factions of a discipline, then you are probably starting to explore it properly.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well yes. But you omit the faction that unites information and entropy under dissipative structure theory. Folk like Pattee who directly tackle the symbol grounding issue and show how biology works.
Biosemiosis is a theory of life and mind. If you havent solved biology, you are not really ready for the neurobiology or sociocultural levels of biosemiosis.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well actually you would want to drill down to the level of biophysics now that science has got the tools to explore that. That is what really made biosemiosis - of the dissipative structure stripe - credible.
Quoting Wayfarer
Wrote books on it. But once again, dont confuse the epistemic lessons of enactivism with the ontological tradition that is idealism.
Of course we neurobiologically and socioculturally construct our worlds. But the world is still out there and deserves its own best scientific account. The best such account that can then include us in that general physicalist explanation is biosemiosis. The story of how epistemic creatures could arise as Natures way of accelerating its entropy flow.
[quote=Howard Pattee, Physics and Metaphysics of Biosemiosis] The concept of Biosemiotics requires making a distinction between two categories, the material or physical world and the symbolic or semantic world. The problem is that there is no obvious way to connect the two categories. ...I have not solved this problem All I can do is set up the problem clearly by specifying the minimum logical and physical conditions necessary.[/quote]
Quoting apokrisis
Nihilism.
Quoting Relativist
There's an anecdote I sometimes tell. During the 1950's the then Pope Pius XXIV said:
[quote=Wikipedia] Indeed, it seems that the science of today, by going back in one leap millions of centuries, has succeeded in being a witness to that primordial Fiat Lux, when, out of nothing, there burst forth with matter a sea of light and radiation [... Thus modern science has confirmed] with the concreteness of physical proofs the contingency of the universe and the well-founded deduction that about that time the cosmos issued from the hand of the Creator.
Lemaître was reportedly horrified by that intervention and was later able, with the assistance of Father Daniel OConnell, the director of the Vatican Observatory, to convince the Pope not make any further public statements on religious or philosophical interpretations of matters concerning physical cosmology.
According to the theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Paul Dirac,
Once when I was talking with Lemaître about [his cosmological theory] and feeling stimulated by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion. However Lemaître did not agree with me. After thinking it over he suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.[/quote]
What impressed me about this was the fact that Lemaître was, as you will know, a Catholic priest, and yet he was horrified by the Pope's suggestion that his cosmological theory had anything to say about the articles of the faith. He would obviously have no time for the endless debates about the matter that occupy the Internet. That, and that he had the temerity to have the Pope advised to stop saying something, and that the Pope complied, signifying his respect for scientific opinion.
I have the proof which I believe is irrefutable. You dispute the truth of one of my premises. The burden is on you to demonstrate that the premise is false.
Quoting Relativist
You are speaking nonsense. To show my argument is unsound you need to demonstrate that the premise is not true, that is your burden. Otherwise, any argue may be refuted with the proposal of an imaginary "possible" premise which contradicts that of the argument. That is extreme skepticism, which you've already rejected as irrational. Therefore, if you desire to refute the argument, the burden is on you to show that the premise is in fact false, not just insist that there is a possible world in which the premise would be false.
Quoting Relativist
I understand refutation, and I also understand sophistry, which is what you appear to use logic for.
Quoting Relativist
In no way does assuming that laws of nature actually exist explain why we see regularities in nature. This is because "explanation" requires that you show how natural things would have access to these "laws", would be able to read and interpret them, and have the urge to obey them.
To claim that there are laws of nature out there somewhere, and I don't have to say where they are, or how it is that things can understand these laws and obey them, does not explain anything about the regularities of nature. All you appear to be saying is that we describe natural activities according to laws, therefore there must be prescriptive laws which correspond with our descriptive laws, and natural things are obeying these prescriptive laws.
Quoting Relativist
That's incorrect, it fits every set of probability distribution. If one is the correct distribution, the others are excluded as impossible. Therefore it is necessary to understand that it fits "every" set of probability distribution, not "any" one set. Other wise you misunderstand the meaning of "infinite set of possibilities". It is every possibility, not any possibility.
This is clear evidence of the way you behave. A small, intentional ignorance, turns everything around for you. Then you hope that I don't notice your sophistry. Just like above, you try to turn the burden of "refutation" around onto the person making the argument, by claiming that the criteria for "refutation" is to assert that the person making the argument hasn't demonstrate with absolute certainty that all the premises are impossible to be false. Your sophistry knows no bounds, as you've enabled yourself to refute any argument you want, with that simple assertion, simply through your sophistic manipulation of the meaning of "infinite set of possibilities".
Quoting Relativist
You state "what it means to exist", as a state. Then you propose "potential to develop into subsequent states". But this "potential" is not included in your definition of "exist", it is dependent on something else, time. However, "time" is not included as something which exists. Therefore you have a hidden premise, "time". We have "exist" according to your position, and also time, which is something which according to your position does not exist, but it is still necessary for you to account for the reality of things. Therefore you sneak it in as a hidden premise. This is the sophistry which you practise.
Quoting Relativist
Sure it is, through your hidden premise of time, which according to your definition of "exists" does not exist. How do you account for the reality of time? You clearly need it for your argument, yet it escapes your definition of something which exists.
So you're just making the modest claim that the argument convinces you of god's existence. You are not claiming that it constitutes undeniable proof that no rational person could deny.
Nevertheless, I did explain why it might be false: the possibility that there was an initial state of affairs that was physical (no gods). So there are at least 2 logically valid explanations for the existence of the universe: (A) God ; or (B) a physical initial state.
You haven't proven (B) false, so you should acknowledge that it is possibly true, and that this implies God possibly does not exist. Do you acknowledge this?
An hominem would be an irrational judgement that your reasoning was rooted in something about you that has little or logical relation to the matter at hand. My comment was based on giving you the benefit of the doubt that your judgement is rooted in your noetic structure (the sum total of a person's beliefs, plus the relationships between those beliefs, plus the relationships or the relations between those beliefs)
Our noetic structure will always constitute the lens through which we make epistemic judgements. We all do this - there's no negative connotations. It's does not imply irrationality. I respect that your noetic structure differs from mine, and would not suggest this means you're objectively wrong.
Contrast this with the fact that you do not give me the same benefit of the doubt, and openly disrespect my views. And you do this despite your failure to identify a single legitimate flaw in my position. You seem to conflate a reason that you reject something with a knock-down refutation of it.
Fair enough, mistake on my part. However I dont take issue with physicalism because you hold it, but because I believe its a mistaken philosophical view. I believe Ive given you many grounds on which I and others believe physicalism to be a mistaken philosophical view, but that you dont recognize the arguments.
Why does it matter, if it's a category that maps to an empty set?
Quoting Wayfarer
That's an ontological claim: you seem to agree there are no spiritual objects, but hint that "spiritual" applies in some vague way to at some vague things. Stop being vague and describe what you mean, and explain why I should accept your claims.
Vagueness is suspicious: it tends to be both unconvincing and incorrigible. Unconvincing, because of the lack of clarity needed to analyze and evaluate it. Incorrigible because one can twist the vague meanings on the fly in order to counter objections.
Quoting Wayfarer
The only thing being "transformed" is the mind of the person, not the external world. Sure: we are actors in the world, and this seems important because it could positively influence our behaviour - protecting the environment, the welfare of other species, etc. However, this is an epistemological paradigm with moral overtones. It doesn't falsify the ontology I'm defending; nor does it entail an alternative one. Rather - it reenforces the utility of fit-for-purpose paradigms.
Quoting Wayfarer
So is also the sensory evaluation of wine, economics, and architecture. Each topic is explored and discussed within their respective frameworks. Assemble a group of people with similar education on one of these topics and they can have a meaningful discussion, despite having different religions and ethnic backgrounds, because they share the same topic-central basis. I think Trump is a narcissistic, amoral criminal, irrespective of the ontological grounding of these characteristics. I suspect your views aren't too different.
Quoting Wayfarer
There are still definite properties, but these properties are not simple, scalar numbers. Indeed this is at odds with the way we perceive, and interact with, the world.
Quoting Wayfarer
But "meaning" is only intra-mental. It influences how we interact with the world outside our minds, but there's no direct ontological relation between this "meaning" (whatever the ontology of it) and the system it applies to. Furthermore, false understandings influence our interactions just as much as accurate ones.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to be latching onto the
"consciousness causes collapse" interpretation of QM to argue for a more direct quasi-magical role for consciousness in the world-at-large. This certainly can't be treated as evidence in support of your point of view because you're selecting it BECAUSE it's consistent with your point of view.
Quoting Wayfarer
You've provided no reason to think this is a false distinction. Meaning/understanding are intra-mental.
I accounted for our perceiving of universals through the way of abstraction. This process does help us understand aspects of the world, and I've acknowledged that the mental state.associated with a 90 degree angle is distinct from the actual relation between walls. But the words we use are referring to a quality that is actually present in the wall-wall system that is also present in other systems irrespective of whether they have been perceived. It is that quality that is the universal. The walls have no ontological dependence on the perception, the abstraction, nor the general understanding we have. Feel free to argue otherwise, but don't gloss over the ontological (or at least perceived) qualities of the things we are perceiving. If my implied objectification is problematic for you, then give me an account in your terms - including the de-objectification.
I see this as a poetic description of the processes of abstracting and understanding, perfectly consistent, in essentials, with my less unpoetic rendition. If you think I'm missing something, then spell it out. As noted: vagueness hurts your case.
Quoting Wayfarer
LOL! Of course it is sufficiently "elastic"! The specifics are a matter for empirical investigation. The notion that everything that exists is a state of affairs IS explanatory - it tells us something about the nature of existence: properties (color, electric charge, mass, ...) aren't existents; neither are relations (electromagnetic attraction, distance, angle...). Further, there's an acknowledgement that there are universals; nominalism is rejected; foundational tropes are rejected.
There are other implications: it is contrary to the notion essentialism and natural kinds. It accounts for the nature of individual identity. And, of course, it accounts for natural laws, which in turn account for regularities in nature.
In short: it explains what a metaphysical system needs to explain. It doesn't need to explain or predict the objects that physics explains and predicts.
Any metaphysical system that failed to be sufficiently "elastic" to fit accepted science would be FALSIFIED by science. Not because science is necessarily right, but because it is the best available means of identifying what exists, thanks to its strong epistemological methodology.
A silly retort. My semiotic approach starts with accepting that life and mind exist by being in a modelling relation with the world. So that can be considered a variety of epistemic idealism. Peirce of course used Kant as a launch point.
So life and mind are fully part of Nature and entrained to its thermodynamic constraints. Genes and neurons are the obvious physical basis of a relation based on codes, information, symbols habits of interpretance. Biology and neurobiology can tell us all about the way ideas can shape the world.
Biophysics provided the last missing piece when it showed that there is a convergence zone at the semi-classical nanoscale of chemistry where biological information can switch the physical flows of entropy at "no cost". Or at least the flicking of the switch has a single standard small cost the cost of an ATP molecule or two to cause some organic chemical change picked freely from an almost infinite library of such reactions. Any organic molecule you want, we can make it. All same price. You pay $1 please.
So as a variety of epistemic idealism, semiosis is different as it fully cashes out in a rational account of what is taking place at the point where ideas interact with the world. There is no longer any explanatory gap that ontic idealism can exploit. Not even the tiniest one.
And rather than being a species of Nihilism, this biological and neurobiological level semiosis paves the way for the more interesting and complex case that is the linguistic and mathematical semiosis on which human social and cultural order is based. Semiosis based on publicly sourced and shared code in the form of words and numbers.
So say you are concerned with some philosophical notion like "values". You want to know how values as an idea can exist somewhere in an uncaring and Darwinian world. You want to argue that because Scientism leaves no clear place for them, therefore any real argument being omitted here ontic idealism applies. Values are somehow part of the great Platonic absolute. Its own realm of the good, the true, the beautiful, the perfect, the divine, the right. A collection of things of that kind which are the shiny objects in the eternal kingdom of pure ideas.
Well actually you don't want to be so specific about what ontology you mean to commit to at this point. Best to keep it vague otherwise it all starts to fall apart under critical analysis. The important thing is that "values" supports the notion that to the degree science bangs on about the material basis of Being, it is missing "what matters most".
But semiosis happily puts human values back in the actual world. Humans have formed a sociocultural level of organismic being. We exist by modelling the world in terms of our collective narrative and technological habits. We can mine nature to build civilisations. These world narratives or Umwelts could be deemed useful fictions epistemic idealism but they work. They set up a feedback loop that results in a compounding growth in human civilisation.
And the more rational and scientific we become, the more we accelerate that production of human richness and variety. The better we get at harnessing the resources of nature and building whatever idea of paradise we might have in mind.
Of course, "values" then become a problem if we start changing the world so fast that we haven't had enough time to update that way of looking at the world in a way that remains pragmatically useful. Like if we still saddle ourselves with Platonic or Cartesian forms of ontic idealism and value absolutism.
But hey. The science on semiosis is in. The grounds for pragmatism are secured. One can move on and join the modern world engage with it from a vantage point that has the right ideas about it and about us.
Do you still dismiss that as Nihilism?
The argument is that the reference to "spiritual/supernatural objects" is a category error. That by declaring the 'spiritual or supernatural' to consist of 'objects' you are making it an empty set.
Of course it sounds vague when what you want is something very specific, determinable by scientific enquiry, an 'atomic fact'. Questions of this kind are always elusive, that's why the positivists wanted to declare them all meaningless as a matter of principle. They're difficult in a way different to technical and scientific questions.
Quoting Relativist
There, again, is your belief that the world is a certain way, that it has a determinate existence external to your cognition of it. But this is just what has been called into question by both cognitive science and quantum physics.
Quoting Relativist
The linked article says it postulates that 'consciousness is the main mechanism behind the process of measurement'. I say that too is a categorical error - consciousness is not a mechanism nor one cause in a sequence of events. The way I put it is that the act of observation or measurement is ineliminable - cannot be eliminated - in the derivation of an observational outcome. This is why quantum physics calls objectivity into question - not because consciousness is 'a factor' or 'a mechanism'.
I'm essentially arguing that quantum mechanics shows us the limits of the subject/object distinction that classical physics assumed. This is closer to what philosophers like Bohr and Heisenberg were getting at - that the measurement problem isn't a technical issue to be solved but a conceptual lesson about the nature of physical knowledge itself. Hence that Bohr aphorism I already quoted. Here's another one: 'In our description of nature, the purpose is not to disclose the real essence of the phenomena but only to track down, so far as it is possible, relations between the manifold aspects of our experience.' Do you see the Kantian implications of this statement? That we do not see the phenomenon 'in itself', as it is, independently of our observation of it. We're involved in producing the outcome. Whereas in classical physics, we're at arms length from the outcome, we can maintain that sense of separateness which objectivity requires. But that sense of scientific detachment and objectivity, is also very much a cultural artifact, typical of a very specific period in history and culture. It is also where objectivist physicalism is located.
The fact that you will invariably interpret this as being a causal sequence where consciousness is one thing, the effect another, is the same issue as treating the spiritual or supernatural as 'an object'. As I said, requires perspectival shift to see why.
Quoting Relativist
I just have! I'm trying to convey a difficult point about the nature and limitations of objective thought, but everything I'm saying is interpolated into an idiom within which only what is considered objective is admissable. Consequently, we're 'talking past' one another. Much of analytical philosophy is propositional in nature - propositions built around a lexicon of states-of-affairs, properties, and the like (hence the interminable and circular threads on 'jtb'). Participatory and perspectival knowing are different to that. They're more characteristic of tradional philosophies, in existential and spiritual practices, ways-of-being in the world.
I'll hasten to add, I'm no exemplar of the philosophic sage who has mastered such 'ways of being' and what they entail. By no means. But I at least recognise them.
Quoting apokrisis
You did mention
Quoting apokrisis
Let's unpack that, for those unfamiliar with the terminology. Pa?iccasamupp?da (Pali Buddhism) and Prat?tyasamutp?da (Sanskrit Buddhism) refers to the 'chain of dependent co-arising'. It is a causal chain, comprising 12 steps (nidanas) the details of which are too voluminous to summarize here. It is casually expressed as 'This being, that becomes; this ceasing, that fades away'. It begins with 'avidya', meaning ignorance (literally 'not seeing') and unfolds through this 12-step sequence comprising in part mental formations, name and form, feelings, cravings, and so on (wikipedia entry.) It is represented iconographically as the Bhavachakra, the 'wheel of life and death'. There is also a reverse formulation, with the negation of each of the 12 links, culminating in nibbana which is release from the wheel of life and death.
Within this lexion, materialism or physicalism are designated ucchedav?da (nihilist) the view that the subject is nothing other than the body, and that death is annihilation. At the opposite extreme is sassatav?da, the view that there is an eternal I or self that is reborn in perpetuity. In the Buddha's culture, there was widespread (though not universal) belief in reincarnation, so the 'eternalists' were those who believed that by virtuous practices, they could secure an un-ending sequence of propitious re-births in the future. (I'm inclined to think that this also describes populist Christian views of Heaven.)
So implicity within all of this, there is a beyond life-and-death. But it would be a mistake to conceive of it as 'something that exists'. A S?t? Zen master, for whom I have great respect, put it like this:
[quote=Nishijima-Roshi, 'Three Philosophies and One Reality']Buddhists believe in the Universe. The Universe is, according to philosophers who base their beliefs on idealism, a place of the spirit. Other philosophers whose beliefs are based on a materialistic view, say that the Universe is composed of the matter we see in front of our eyes. Buddhist philosophy takes a view which is neither idealistic nor materialistic; Buddhists do not believe that the Universe is composed of only matter. They believe that there is something else other than matter. But there is a difficulty here; if we use a concept like spirit to describe that something else other than matter, people are prone to interpret Buddhism as some form of spiritualistic religion and think that Buddhists must therefore believe in the actual existence of spirit. So it becomes very important to understand the Buddhist view of the concept spirit.
I am careful to refer to spirit as a concept here because in fact Buddhism does not believe in the actual existence of spirit. So what is this something else other than matter which exists in this Universe? If we think that there is a something which actually exists other than matter, our understanding will not be correct; nothing physical exists outside of matter.
Buddhists believe in the existence of the Universe. Some people explain the Universe as a universe based on matter. But there also exists something which we call value or meaning. A Universe consisting only of matter leaves no room for value or meaning in civilizations and cultures. Matter alone has no value. We can say that the Universe is constructed with matter, but we must also say that matter works for some purpose.
So in our understanding of the Universe we should recognize the existence of something other than matter. We can call that something spirit, but if we do we should remember that in Buddhism, the word spirit is a figurative expression for value or meaning. We do not say that spirit exists in reality; we use the concept only figuratively.[/quote]
I'm struck by the similarity to one of the aphorisms at the end of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:
Quoting 6.41
But what could lie outside the world? From our viewpoint, nothing. But that is not the 'nothing' of nihilism. It is 'that of which we cannot speak'.
Quoting apokrisis
I grant that, it has a lot in common with phenomologists and existentialists, and I've learned and am learning a lot from it. It's a big improvement on lumpen materialism. But as you will often acknowledge, it envisages no end to the existence apart from its physical dissolution.
This runs into a problem when science tells us matter is shaped by a thermodynamic purpose. The Big Bang could happen as it was a grand carving out of the very Heat Sink it was throwing itself headlong into. The Universe expands so it can cool, and cools so it can expand. Some material crud forms in the midst of all that once the temperature has dropped to a few degrees from absolute zero and distance has grown so that planets are only moderately warmed by the dying fusion embers that is their local star.
Then civilisation and culture can rise up out of the biofilm that starts to coat a rocky planet with a convenient temperature. You get little critters and then clever apes. A narrative game starts up that leads to a technological one. You get a lot of talk about values as the way to coordinate a bunch of people using an easily sharable social algorithms. Little aphorisms like the Golden Mean and "do unto others". It helps bind the people to the authority of a value system if they believe it is not just pragmatically optional but absolute and damnable by hell fire. Or perhaps instead penalised by coming back in the next life to try over from the level of a bug or mushroom.
Hey, when faced with the strained metaphysics used to bolster ontic idealism, I do start to see the advantages of nihilism.
If civilisation and culture want values and meaning, do they really have to commit to idealism and its absolutism? Can't a sorry old pragmatist like me not have values and meaning without all the claptrap? Just living a productive life and enjoying it?
Of course, I said the proof is "irrefutable", I didn't say it was "undeniable". As you've aptly demonstrated, anyone can deny anything, no matter how irrefutable it is. All they need to do is fabricate a completely fictitious, imaginary "logical possibility", claim that they believe this "possibility" instead, and start denying. But denying it does not refute it, so I continue to believe that it is irrefutable.
Quoting Relativist
I'll repeat myself. All empirical evidence indicates that any, and every, "physical state of affairs" is posterior in time, to the potential for that state. Since this is known with the highest degree of certitude possible, then we can conclude that any proposed "initial state of affairs that was physical" (simply interpreted as 'first physical thing') necessarily had a cause which was actual, and prior to it in time. That's a nonphysical cause. This conclusion requires the further premise that something actual is required, as cause, to produce any actuality from potential.
Quoting Relativist
I don't dispute (B), the "physical initial state". The point though, is that the argument demonstrates that an actual cause of such a thing is necessary. The potential for that initial physical state, by itself, does not suffice as the cause of it. That actual cause is something nonphysical, and what is commonly referred to as God.
Apokrisis will insist that a cause is not necessary, that the physical initial state just sprang into existence from infinite potential, as a quantum fluctuation, or some type of symmetry breaking. But this is irrational for the reasons I explained above. In a realm of infinite possibility there would be nothing which could actualize (select) one possibility (quantum fluctuation or symmetry breaking) instead of the others, all possibilities being balanced and equally possible.
When the argument of "chance occurrence", random event, abiogenesis, etc., is taken to the extreme, such as when it is taken to explain the very existence of "the physical universe", its irrationality becomes extremely evident. It's a matter of saying that something comes from nothing, where "nothing" is replaced with "potential". The physical universe comes from the potential for it. But this requires that we make "potential" into something real, and the only way to do this is to assign to it some degree of actuality, which is not physical. So we assume the actual existence of the nonphysical.
I can't help but notice the teleological implications in this expression - purpose, 'throwing itself ' 'so it can...'. All intentional language. Maybe that's what came back into physicalism with semiotics, but it sounds idealist to me.
Quoting apokrisis
In Buddhist lore, there is no God handing out penalties. Everything that befalls one is one's own doing - that's what karma means. But it also says those who behave like animals may indeed end up being one.
Quoting apokrisis
I'm sorry you thought my post was 'claptrap'. I intended it as a sincere attempt to make a serious philosophical point.
Its...
In logic, the corollary of that is that value alone has no matter. And that is absolutist talk, matey!
As a relativist or dichotomist, I would says "matter" might be regarded as a state of minimal value, and "value" as a state of minimal matter. This phrasing makes clear my ontic commitment. I am speaking of matter and value as now the connected limits of a dynamical balance. Reality is to be found in between these limiting ideas. Reality is always some hylomorphic mix of matter and value if that is the terminology you insist on using.
It sort of works from a systems point of view as value does speak to purpose or telos. But form is also important as purposes have to be embodied as causal structures structures of constraint. When you call something good, or beautiful, or divine, or whatever, the question becomes, well what is the shape of that? What does that look like in practice?
Even Plato's realm of ideas had this hierarchical structure. The universal notion of the Good anchoring the Universe of mathematical forms that gave structure to the concept of the ultimately optimal. The sub-realm of triangles gets to know what its best most beautiful and regular shape is. Then all the triangles that are increasingly ugly and mishappen in some way. Down to the truly crappy triangles being scratched out with a twig in the sand.
Absolutist talk sounds important and impressive. But it equivocates.
If you parse this phrase carefully, what function is "alone" serving? Does matter have no value after it has been emptied of value, and so some value had to have been there all along? Just as little as possible. Matter becomes defined as a state of infinitesimal value, and then that seeming so close to zero, we can forget to ask how matter might enjoy both some kind of value and also no kind of value in the same breath.
Idealism can shrink its inconsistencies very small with coy wording. Yet always the equivocation lurks.
I'm surprised you say that. What, then, of the corrollary I noted from Wittgenstein? Him also?
I think it maps perfectly well against the 'cartesian division' that I already noted - the fact that according to early modern science, 'physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers.' I'm not saying that your pansemiotic metaphysics adheres to that, but I think it's a fair characterisation of the mainstream scientific worldview, at least until quite recently. The objective sciences deal with quantitative measurement, whereas values are qualitative judgements. That is the origin of Humes is-ought problem. It could quite easily be argued that the whole point of biosemiotic philosophy was to ameliorate this division. This ought not to be controversial.
Quoting apokrisis
In pre-modern philosophy that is the subject explored by Pierre Hadot. But lets not lose sight of the thread - it was you that introduced the Buddhist chain of dependent origination to the conversation, in association with several other schools of thought. I sought to elaborate on that, in respect of the claim that life and mind can be completely understood in thermodynamic terms. So I pointed out that Buddhist philosophy would not agree with that; that human existence cannot be regarded solely in those terms. But that as to why not, it is not through positing some non-physical existent. I realise its a subtle and difficult point to get across, but it was not made idly, it can be supported with reference to sources, hence the mention of Nishijima, who was no idealist absolutist.
I dont agree but its not an issue. You are talking here about epistemic idealism and thats near enough pragmatism. We are modellers of reality and so always on the side of subjectivity in that sense. No problem there.
Its how you slide into ontic idealism which I question. I appreciate that you do make an effort to bat for idealism. But the pattern seems to be that one minute we are talking about cognition as a useful way of constructing the world - an embodied model of the world as it is from a point of view that includes an us as its centre - and the next you assume that an ontological argument has been made. That this us is more than just a figment or avatar of that world modelling activity. Suddenly something that was an agreed part of the epistemic process has broken free and exists in its own unplaced realm outside the pragmatic modelling relation an organism has with its environment.
Quoting Wayfarer
But thats not what I say. What I say is that life and mind are so grounded in the task of navigating entropic flows that it would be hard to escape this most basic reasons for evolving a body and a mind.
Humans - as social organisms - could perhaps have the complexity to rise above the world in some way. Yet look close at human history and one doesnt see that. There is a lot of talk about high flying ideals, yet all the social activity cashes out in creating a machinery of exponential growth.
Quoting Wayfarer
So where does value come from in this telling? Is it on the side of the epistemic relation between an organism and its world, or is it something more - an ontological level break between the realm of matter and the realm of ideas?
Exactly. Walk me through it.
Your source equivocates. That is what I pointed out. Is the qualification that spirit is only used figuratively meant to walk us back from the ontic to the epistemic? We talk as if value and meaning are separate from material being and yet share the same Universe, but that separateness is then just a figure of speech?
Are we walking idealism all the way back to semiosis - which indeed says physical systems share the world with organismic systems? Entropy can be regulated by information. Clearly I would be happy with that and only want to claim that semiosis is the well worked out scientific theory that now makes good this epistemic version of idealism.
But you appear to want to defend some version of ontic idealism. And your sources likewise equivocate at the crucial point.
You, yourself, actually "defend some version of ontic idealism". I'm surprised that you still haven't come to recognize this. Your first principle, absolute potential, the symmetry which is the foundation for symmetry-breaking, is nothing but an ideal. Therefore you place the ideal as prior to everything. That is common to physicalism, as physics leans heavily on mathematical ideals.
This is actually what happened to "materialism" over the years. People would grasp "matter" as the first principle of the material world, without realizing that "matter" was simply an ideal, as Berkeley demonstrated. Then materialism was reducible to idealism, and Marx demonstrated that the inversion of this is also true. The result is that materialism and idealism are actually equivalent. Aristotle demonstrated this as well.
Remember that I never set out to convince you physicalism is true. My objectives were to help you understand it, and to provide my justification for believing it.
[Quote]I believe Ive given you many grounds on which I and others believe physicalism to be a mistaken philosophical view, but that you dont recognize the arguments.[/quote]
Your reasons seem to boil down to fact that it's inconsistent with your other beliefs. It's perfectly reasonable to interpret new information in terms of one's background beliefs, and it's justified to to reject a proposal on that basis. But this rejection is subjective: epistemically contingent on your particular background beliefs (subsumed in your overall noetic structure).
But this means YOUR reasons to reject it do not falsify MY beliefs. And vice versa: my reasons to reject your position are epistemically contingent upon my background beliefs. The difference is that I recognize this contingency - and that's why I can respect your position. You overlook this contingency, and hence you conflate your subjective basis for rejecting physicalism with an objective falsification.
If you happen to think you are rejecting it on some meta-ontological principles, so they rise above subjective judgement, then state these principles and be prepared to show how they apply to your theory.
Quoting Relativist
Quoting Wayfarer
What categories should I have used when explaining how "I made sense" of the meaning of "physical"- after you indicated I'd "left the meaning of 'physical' indeterminate"? I referenced categories of hypothetical objects that many take for granted:
-supernatural/spiritual objects- a common belief about God and angels
-abstract objects - a common belief of platonists
So again, this expresses only how I make sense of it. That's apparently inadequate for you because you have different view - but it's a view you haven't explained. You seem to be implying we should treat "spiritual or supernatural" differently - not as objects, but as -------what? You haven't said. Don't leave it "indeterminate" and vague.
Quoting Wayfarer
You're either being disingenuous or you didn't make an effort to understand what I said. I precisely defined the way "state of affairs" is used in the ontology, distinguishing it from the common use of the term: 1) as a term that applies to everything that exists, from the foundational to the most complex; 2) that it consists of a particular, with its properties and relations
State of affairs (so defined) is the most fundamental concept in the ontology. Armstrong labelled his book, "A World of States of Affairs".
I referenced this model when referring to immanent universals, and pointed out that quantum fields fit the model. The ontology hangs together quite consistenly, and if you don't see that - then you were premature in dropping the topic. There's nothing vague about the ontology itself, so any perceived vagueness could be cleared up. No one's compelling you to pursue it further, but recognize the folly of trying to falsify something you don't understand.
I did not say, "physical is what physics would someday describe". I said that an idealized, complete, perfect physics would do so (I also said this is unachieveable). I described this in terms of everything in existence being causally connected- this being the basis for my claim about a complete, perfected physics. If that wasn't sufficiently clear, you could have asked - but that was when you'd decided you didn't have anything more to say about it. I will offer this- my definition of naturalism:
Naturalism is a metaphysical system that assumes as a first principle that the natural world comprises the totality of reality. The natural world consists of ourselves, the world that is reflected in our senses, and everything that is causally connected through laws of nature.
You naively complained (in effect) that physicalism didn't provide a catalog what exists, but you have said very little about what you believe exists. You suggested that maybe the moon doesn't exist when we aren't looking at it! I get the phenomonolgy point, but we're talking ontology- are you not willing to commit to the existence of the objects of ordinary experience? Do you deny the existence of astronomical objects? Do you propose skepticism on everything other than your mind? This lack of clarity is considerably broader than the finer points of physicalism.
I am left wondering: do you deny the existence of objects, and types of objects, that have been identified by physics to date? I mean this in the falibilist terms associated with science, but also in terms of being justified as belief by the strength of its epistemology.
Quoting Wayfarer
You don't need to put it in scientific terms, but you need to be as "determinate" as you expected me to be. So far, you've made no specific claims (other than the implication that you believe your mind exists), just vague allusions. I haven't noticed any specific claims about what exists. If I've overlooked it, remind me. If you can't do this is straightforward terms, then understand why this is problematic.
Quoting Wayfarer
You're being unreasonable. You had said, "It involves being in a deep, transformative relationship with the world, participating fully in something that is wider than you."
Why would I think this "transformative relationship" involves something more than a change to the mind that is involved, and the impact we have through our actions? The sentence makes perfect sense in those terms. I did suspect you had something more in mind, but I shouldn't have to guess.
My point of view: we are part of the world; part of the earthly ecosphere. So OF COURSE we are participants. This much is consistent with naturalism. So describe what you mean about this participation that renders it inconsistent with naturalism.
Quoting Wayfarer
We're only involved in producing the contents of our minds. And we have employed our minds to get an understanding of what exists outside of it. Are you suggesting this is futile? I don't think you are, but it's consistent with your vague claims. If you agree it's not futile, then what IS your point?
[Quote Whereas in classical physics, we're at arms length from the outcome, we can maintain that sense of separateness which objectivity requires. But that sense of scientific detachment and objectivity, is also very much a cultural artifact, typical of a very specific period in history and culture. It is also where objectivist physicalism is located.[/quote]
This seems like a vague reference to your vague cocept of "participatory' . Is there anything outside your mind that you commit to existing? Is it justified to believe there are planetary systems in Andromeda? If so, how do we "participate" with these?
Quoting Wayfarer
Of course it requires a perspectival shift, but you need to explain this alternate perspective! Vague allusions doesn't do it. Vague reference to phenomenonlogy doesn't do it whe you also haven't acknowledged the actual existence of anything external to yourself. I expect you do, but if so- explain how we can know this despite the phenomenology. This is why it's vague.
Quoting Wayfarer
No, you did not provide a reason. You merely suggested there's an alternative perspective that makes different distinctions. You would need to outline this perspective, the distinctions it makes, and explain how it's superior (not just different).
Since you acknowledge it's a difficult point, don't blame me for being the obstacle to understanding. You've treated my questions as obstinacy, but all I'm doing is reflecting back how I interpret what you said. You haven't given me an alternative, interpretive framework.
But you also need to establish some common ground, such as by identifying some things we both agree exist.
Your definition of "state of affairs", as stated in your reply to me, does not support your claim that it is the most fundamental concept in ontology. Your definition can be broken down in analysis into two distinct aspects, objects and their relations. These are two very different concepts, and since "state of affairs" is made up of these two, they are each more fundamental than "state of affairs".
Further, you determined another feature of reality, the potential for change, which was necessary for your ontology. This implies that time is another fundamental concept in ontology. You have provided no argument to demonstrate that "state of affairs" is more fundamental than "time".
I hadn't discussed "state of affairs" ontology with you, so had not used the term that way.
But since you brought it up, I didn't say "it was the most fundamental thing in ontology". I said it was the most fundamental think in Armstrong's physicalist ontology.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You don't understand what a state of affairs is in Armstrong's ontology. I'm not interested in taking the time to explain it with you, but you can get a sense of it in the Wikipedia Article on Armstrong.
Well firstness is actually vagueness in Peirces logic-based approach. That to which the PNC does not apply. And therefore where the symmetry breaking of a dichotomy can start.
So unformed potential and unactualised form would exist together in the less than nothing that would be a logical vagueness. The absolute potential is the potential for the emergence of a hylomorphic order in a co-arising fashion. The metaphysics is more subtle than you appreciate.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Likewise, change can start to become definite only to the degree that stability starts to become definite. So to ground that as a metalogic of existence, you need to start of in some state of radical indeterminacy such as an Apeiron or Vagueness.
An everythingness that is a nothingness and so is prior to any somethingness in that it defines what needs to start happening to get anything going. The Apeiron must begin to separate out or symmetric break in the counter directions that are the forming of stabilising constraints and dynamical degrees of freedom. Time can get going as changes can be made that are also constructing a collective history.
You definitely discussed "state of affairs" ontology with me, in your reference to an initial state of affairs. You even defined it for me:
Quoting Relativist
See, "state of affairs" implies objects and relations, two distinct fundamental ontological concepts. Then you go on to talk about the potential for change, in the future, which implies another fundamental ontological concept, the passing of time:
Quoting Relativist
How can you deny what you yourself wrote?
This is the point I take exception to, by way of Aristotle's cosmological argument. With the cosmological argument he denies the concept of "prime matter", as physically impossible.
If the potential is truly absolute, then there is nothing actual, as anything actual would be a constraint to the possibility. But without something actual, to act as the cause, the emergence of something, anything, is impossible.
Quoting apokrisis
How could time emerge? Isn't emergence a temporal concept, something which happens over time? It seems self-contradicting to talk about time getting started as changes happen.
Yes I did, and this is not the definition used by Armstrong. That's why I said:
Quoting Relativist
The Buddhist goal is nibbana (Nirv??a), liberation from the cycle of re-birth. Everything in the Buddhist world is calbrated against that. It is the subject of the eightfold path and Four Truths.
But here is where Nishijima's Mah?y?na background is philosophically significant. Early Buddhism was dualistic in that worldly existence was to be shunned. It was a strictly renunciate religion. Mah?y?na was a later development in Buddhist history, associated with the figure of N?g?rjuna (although its precise origins are a bit of a mystery.) But for Mah?y?na, Nirv??a is not a separate realm to Sa?s?ra, and there are not two separate realms (Theravada Buddhism doesn't accept this.) In Mah?y?na, 'Nirv??a is Sa?s?ra released, and Sa?s?ra is Nirv??a grasped'. The Bodhisattva doesn't leave the world behind, but is voluntarily born out of compassion, not out of the compulsion and grasping that drives the cycle for other beings.
This is why, in Buddhist iconography, in the graphic illustration of the 'wheel of life and death', the Buddha is depicted as outside all of the 'six realms', but in some representations, also inside each of them.
Also I would call attention to this phrase 'epistemic relation of self and world.' One point I noticed in Buddhist Studies, is the expression 'self-and-world' is frequently encountered in the Pali Buddhist texts as a kind of single unit of meaning ('self-and-world') This is understood as 'co-arising' or 'co-dependent', actually, one of the sources of the ideas in The Embodied Mind, as Franscisco Varela absorbed this from Buddhism. That is due, as noted above, to the phenomenological aspect of Buddhism, which never looses sight the relationship between experience and being (also why The Embodied Mind presents a kind of hybrid of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and Buddhist praxis.)
Quoting apokrisis
Nishijima is not equivocating so much as refusing both horns of a dilemma which is forced on us by the dualism of mind and matter. Value and meaning are real, but not due to there being a 'non-material substance'. Thats why Nishijima calls spirit a figure of speech - to stop us turning it into a metaphysical theory. This is why I keep returning to the 'Cartesian Division'. You yourself might not hold to it, but you can't deny that it is a major current in today's culture - the separation of mind (res cogitans) and matter (res extensa), which results in the reification of mind as a kind of 'thinking substance'. ('Reification' comes directly from the root 'res'.) So 'spirit' is not any kind of object, thing or substance so much as a figurative way of referring to the source of value and meaning. What is that source? I think that here, a deep sense of not knowing the answer to that question is required. It's not something inside of our conceptual nets. Hence Wittgenstein, 'the sense of the world lies outside the world'.
I've told you different too many times to count. But these days AI can take the labour out of refuting your theological nonsense.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Exactly, potentiality is without constraint. But events demonstrate that constraints can emerge in conjunction with their degrees of freedom the actualising step that creates now a sea of concrete possibilities.
Once you have the thing of a fluctuation an action that also has some direction then everything starts to get going.
No action, no direction. No direction, no action. But actions in a direction? A whole flood of them. Complexity can start evolving.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Time would evolve as cosmology tells us. It develops complex structure through the growth of topological order. As the Big Bang expands and cools, it undergoes a rapid sequence of thermal changes.
In the beginning, all the fluctuations are stuck at the speed of light. They experience maximum time dilation and length contraction or rather, this relativistic dichotomy can't even apply yet.
Then you get the Higgs mechanism breaking this relativistic symmetry. Now suddenly it is meaningful to talk about objects at rest. Particles that move slower than c. Mass that lags behind the radiation setting the pace. A new topological phase where time has gained a whole new complex structure.
Time changes character quite radically. And it passes through other topological stages too with inflation, or when it is a quark-gluon plasma that may have Higgs mass and yet is still effectively relativistic.
So what is time when you step right back from the physics? It is a duration. A beat that lasts the distance of a cycle. A Planck-scale rotation in its Planck-scale expanse. The fundamental unit of ? or the quantum unit of action. The spinning on the Poincare invariant spot that defines the gauge fundamental particle. The first moment defined in terms of the symmetry breaking of rotation from translation and thus the birth of concrete dimensionality itself.
So yes, time is emergent. But physics likes to keep thing simple. Unless you are asking cosmological-level questions, you don't need to worry about all the messy topological details I've just mentioned. They were pretty much done and dusted in the first billionth of a second anyway. After the first few minutes, all the kinks were well and truly vanishing in the rear view mirror.
But this is precisely the meaning of 'relativism'. It is 'what is right for me' and 'what is right for you.' You have your reasons, and I mine. It is kind of obligatory in a pluralist culture but it needs to be seen for what it is.
Furthermore, my arguments against physicalism have been mainly metacognitive (based on arguments from the structure of cognition) and transcendental (in a neo-kantian sense) rather than objective.
Quoting Relativist
Are persons objects? When you interact with your loved ones, are you interacting with objects? Persons can be treated as objects for some purposes demographics, epidemiology, or even grammar but ordinarily we relate to them as beings, with an IThou relation rather than an IIt. If divine beings are real, they would be real in the same way as beings, not as objects.
The very division between natural and supernatural is a historical artifact. The Royal Societys 1660s charter explicitly forbade research into metaphysik, consigning questions about spirit, angels, and the divine to the Church. Science defined itself by excluding those domains, and physicalism inherits that exclusion. So when you define physical in contrast with spiritual/supernatural objects, you are already working within that modern boundary one which is itself the result of a particular history, not an inevitable metaphysical truth. Our sense of what is real is often defined within the bounds of what is scientifically verifiable in principle. Thats why we tend to assume that if something is to be considered real, it must be an object. But thats very much a feature of our culture, shaped by the scientific revolution. Other philosophical traditions dont take objectivity as the sole criterion.
As for abstract objects - I'm trying to find time to research and write on it. But the very short version, is that abstract objects - number, say - are not really objects as such, except in the metaphorical sense of being 'an object of thought'. But really there is no such thing as number.The confusion about the nature of abstracta goes back in intellectual history to the erasure of the 'scala naturae', the so-called 'Great Chain of Being'. Within this schema, there is room for different levels of existence. Intelligible objects, such as number, exist on a different level to material objects (Plato's 'dianoia' being one division on the Divided LIne). My heuristic is that they don't exist, but they're real, in that they're the same for any rational intellect. So I reject the simplistic idea that Platonism says that 'numbers exist in some ethereal domain'. There is no such 'domain' - and yet, there is a domain of natural numbers, right? 2 and 4 are in it, and the square root of minus 1 is outside it. But 'inside' and 'outside' here are metaphorical. The key point being that again, it extends the scope of what can be considered real beyond empiricism (hence the suspicion of Platonism).
Quoting Relativist
Oh, please. I gave reference to an article on it. There is plenty that is 'vague about the ontology', which can be summed up in one word: uncertainty. This is based on three of the better popular books written about the subject:
I've asked you this rhetorically before: why do these books have the sub-titles they do? Why 'the great debate about the nature of reality'? Why 'the struggle for the soul of science'? Why 'the unfinished quest'? You don't seem to grasp the enormity of the philosophical questions. In your mind, it's a nice, neat system, where 'states of affairs' can be used to label the shifting sands of scientific speculation for the purposes of argument. When the Vienna Circle members visited Niels Bohr in Copenhagen, he gave them a lecture on quantum physics. At the end, they politely applauded, but he was nonplussed when none of them asked any questions. This is when he said 'if you're not shocked by quantum physics, then you could not have understood it'.
Quoting Relativist
Where 'the natural world' is what can be detected by the senses (augmented by instruments) or hypothesised on the mathematical analysis of such data. But already, this excludes the observer.
[quote=Thomas Nagel, Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament] Philosophy in general is the most systematic form of self-consciousness. It consists in bringing to consciousness for analysis and evaluation everything that in ordinary life is invisible because it underlies and pervades what we are consciously doing. Language, thought, consciousness itself become the explicit objects of philosophical attention instead of just serving as the medium for our lives.[/quote]
Much of which is excluded by your definition.
Household duties call, I will be back some other time.
And is that a credible belief when we examine what it would entail? It may indeed function as a key narrative to justify and transmit the Buddhist way of life with a community of that mind. But do you really expect to die a man and come back as a monkey, frog or amoeba? Start climbing the whole damn evolutionary tree all over again, with the level of mind and selfhood that goes with that level of materially embodied cognitive structure that goes with those lifeforms, until you get to be a Tibetan monk and make the magical last step?
If it were not for its pragmatic value as a social narrative organising a particular brand of social order, you would just have to think it a whole heap of silliness. Nothing something that could be asserted with a straight face.
Quoting Wayfarer
So the theology evolved its social logic and continued to equivocate on the metaphysical details.
That's perfectly fine if we are talking about useful fictions the epistemic idealism that is the organising Umwelt of a sociocultural level of organismic existence. It's just a parable. Get its message and don't fuss about the credibility of the world-building.
But if you want to challenge science and its narrative, you can see the problem. Yes you can say that science is just another society-constructing narrative too. It is just as much a useful fiction. And indeed when it runs out of control in Scientistic fashion it gives good reason to doubt that it is even useful anymore.
But it gets a bit apples and oranges as Buddhism was a way of social organising that made sense in an agrarian context that never looked like progressing to the next level of a fossil fuel based industrial revolution.
Indeed, as the Chinese experience showed, this was a step that the social order suppressed. The Chinese were great at technology but never minded to become a technological society. Instead Confucianism arose as a philosophy of bureaucratic control a way to hold a volatile peasant state in a persistent state of agrarian order.
So yes, science is just another mindset for building a sociological level of organismic existence. It is epistemic idealism of another brand. But in realising that idealism is the epistemology and not the ontology getting the relation with the world the right way around science clearly released the next level of social development.
And while times may be turbulent, ancient times were turbulent too. All the greatest mass deaths were civil wars or invasions in China, our most ancient and prosperous of civilisations.
So we are rather stuck with the reality of the human condition, no matter what is its stage of development or enlightenment. Which is why we need the muscular rationality of pragmatism. A metaphysics large enough to understand why we do what we do even as we are doing it. Not flimsy creation myths and moral codes forged in pre-industrial times.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, fine. But again first the statement about an epistemic relation and then the equivocating leap to an ontological interpretation.
The embodied mind is our pragmatic model of the "world" is in fact a model of the "world with a self as its central fact". So the world is rendered epistemically. And so is the self. They co-arise as a dichotomisation that produces two exactly contrasting, so exactly complementary, points of view. There is the view the world has of you, and the view you have of the world, all bound up in the one model the one model that is the embodied structure of some thermalising organism.
So this is all epistemic idealism thus far. Both world and self are products of a modelling relation embodied in the structure of an organism. The doubled viewpoints that speak to each other. A world made of matter and the self made of its ideas its wishes, hopes, plans and fears. The two sides to a pragmatically-focused relation that can be run as the "internal" model that animates the organism.
But then once you start breaking out this "self" as some kind of ontological essence or substantial being a spirit stuff then you have crossed a line and now need to provide a new justification for what you have started claiming.
You can pretend to wind things back in by saying, well, when I said "spirit", I was merely speaking figuratively.
But you know that you then don't. You forget that qualification and launch off into everything that a metaphysics based on dualism, spirit-stuff, value absolutism, divine essences, cycles of reincarnation and the like, would appear to warrant.
Ontic idealism in all its glory. The self-contradicting thing of a figurative narrative now being treated as the literal truth. Equivocation being the means of jumping that shark.
All the empirical evidence is for states that were preceded in time by another state, so this pattern would not apply to a hypothetical initial state.
You also fail to account for this pattern. I suggest it's because of deterministic* laws of nature that cause the prior state to become the next state. Do you agree? If not, then give me your theory.
* at least probabilistic determinism.
Thats rather a cartoon version of what is implied by this belief system, but then, thats something Ive come to expect. Yes, I do believe that death is not the end of life. It certainly is for the individual that I am. But the causes that gave rise to this life will give rise to another (something which gives me no joy). But then, nearly everything you write about what you consider religion is coloured by your distaste for it.
There was a Buddhist Studies scholar, Paul Williams, who wrote well known textbooks on Buddhism. About ten years ago, he renounced his acceptance of Buddhism, and his conversion (or reversion) to Catholicism. On the grounds that he might be reborn as a cockroach. At the time, I discussed that with Buddhist acquaintances. They were certainly not scornful of his conversion - good luck to him, was the sentiment - but they felt that the fear was completely irrational. Nobody comes back as a cockroach. It is true that in traditional Buddhist lore, the animal realm was one of the six domains in which beings take birth, but there is nothing like that kind of belief.
Quoting apokrisis
Hence Nishijma saying that there is no such thing!
Quoting apokrisis
[quote=Maurice Merleau Ponty] The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects[/quote]
So in what sense is that now any different from what the biologist would say? Except biology has the detail and removes the equivocation.
Quoting Wayfarer
So again, what would reincarnation and nirvana mean in your modernist Buddhism? What are your ontic commitments that might allow me to distinguish it from everyday biological science?
Quoting Wayfarer
The argument here is that you are always being accused of being vague, equivocal and confused on this key point. This is just more deflection from a question that has been clearly put. Once more, we are getting no proper answer.
Are you confessing finally to just being an epistemic idealist? And modern Buddhism is only that too? If so, great. Just be brave enough to come out and say it. And then be consistent in that position in your posting.
Biology is not an existential discipline. It isnt concerned with existence as lived. I could know all there is to know about you, biologically, and yet still not understand you as a person. As for what it means to me - obviously I cant claim to know that the cycle of life and death is real but I think there are strong grounds for believing it to be. (Weve discussed Stevensons interviews with children with past life recall many times on this forum, it is universally scorned, but I think it is meaningful data. He has almost 3000 cases gathered over three decades.) My fear is that there is truth in the idea that future births are the consequence of ones actions in this life, as I have done plenty to regret. Hence the saying in Buddhism of the fortunate human birth - as that is the only form of life in which one is able to hear the teachings and enact them.
Im neither vague nor deflecting on the question of the meaning of Nirv??a. On one hand, I obviously dont know in the first-person sense, otherwise you would be interacting with a Buddha, which I assure you is not the case. On the other hand there is voluminous literature and iconography that goes back for millenia which communicate something of the meaning of the term. And one can have glimpses of it. None of this is scientific, but then, this is a philosophy forum, not a science forum. Its also not necessarily in conflict with science, but it is in conflict with both Christian dogma, and philosophical materialism (as there is no medium identified by which memory can be transmitted other than the physical.)
Its an acknowledgement, not a confession. I dont regard epistemic idealism as a sin, even if I have many (and one thing I did retain from my upbringing is a Christian conscience.) The mind created world OP is epistemic idealism, largely based on my reading of T R V Murti The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, which compared Buddhist Madhyamaka (Middle Way) philosophy with Kants idealism (something that has been criticised but which I think still holds.) Ive also been reading recently from Evan Thompson and Hans Jonas on the phenomenology of biology, which holds promise.
So I do argue that the common concept of mind independence i.e. that the bedrock of reality comprises mind-independent objects, is oxymoronic, as objects can only be known cognitively (in line with Kants Copernican Revolution in philosophy, that things conform to thoughts, not vice versa. ) That is why there are references to all those sources in that OP, and I dispute that it is either equivocal or vague. But that is really all I have time for now.
But you were talking about biology as the general cycle of life, not about the neurobiology or sociology that might particularise me as a human individual in the modern world and not a frog or amoeba or human as part of the great mystic cycle of life . and figuratively, spirit.
So more deflection.
Quoting Wayfarer
Jesus wept. Im out if we are now stooping to this. Anything goes as evidence as - of course - science can always be doubted. It cant prove spirits dont exist. Therefore they do exist. Or how else otherwise could volumes have been written about them?
You cant give a straight answer so only give me crooked ones.
Quoting Wayfarer
And now the flop the other way. From past life recall back to the safe ground of epistemic idealism.
Nothing vague or equivocal about that at all. :roll:
The only thing that this demonstrates is that whatever AI you selected clearly hasn't read or understood Aristotle, and is probably relying on some less than mediocre secondary sources. Somehow that doesn't surprise me in the least.
Quoting apokrisis
You haven't addressed the problem which I explained as the issue of the cosmological argument. In the condition of absolute potentiality, (infinite degrees of freedom if you prefer), there can be no actuality whatsoever, because any particular actuality would be a constraint, therefore the potentiality would be less than absolute. Aristotle affirms that if this situation ever existed, it would always exist, because any material actuality requires a prior actuality as the cause of it. Since we currently observe the reality of actuality, we can conclude that it is impossible that there ever was a situation of absolute potentiality.
That is a summary of the argument found in Bk 9 of Aristotle's Metaphysics, where he demonstrates that actuality is prior to potentiality in an absolute sense. This rules out the possibility of "prime matter", through reference to current observations of actuality. If there ever was prime matter, matter (potentiality) without form (actuality), there would always be matter without form, but this is inconsistent with what we observe today, matter with form, actuality.
If this is not what is called "the cosmological argument", then maybe you can ask your AI to point me to where i can find the true version of it. I see your current report is quite vague, saying "The argument is primarily developed in his works Physics and Metaphysics". I've read all of those referred works more than once, and find the cosmological argument, as I've stated, in metaphysics Bk 9. I'm sure the AI has not read those works even once.
Quoting apokrisis
I think highly of you apokrisis, and I conclude that you are very intelligent. But statements like this just make me wonder if you actually think about what you are saying sometimes, or if you just want to fill some space with ink. Can't you see that this doesn't make any sense?
You have a number of temporal concepts here "evolve", "develops", "growth", and "rapid sequence". All of the things referred to here require time for their occurrence. How can you seriously propose that time is generated from something which requires time.
I mean maybe cosmology tells you that, as you claim, but don't you read your cosmology with a critical mind? Cosmology is speculative, you can't just read some random articles, and conclude that it is the truth. You need to approach cosmology with a very critical attitude, to determine logical inconsistencies in the speculative hypotheses. When you see self-contradicting propositions like "time emerges", doesn't this make you want to dismiss the entire cosmology which proposes this?
Quoting apokrisis
Here you go, a fine example of spilling ink. What's the point?
Quoting Relativist
Then obviously, the concept of "initial state" is not consistent with physical reality. Truly it's just an ideal. This concept is a hypothetical tool. it's used in systems theory, arbitrarily applied as a boundary. It really does not correspond with anything that is actually first in reality, because there is a continuity which extends from it into the preceding state. So "initial state" is only an ideal which is arbitrarily applied in practise, depending on the purpose. When applied, we always know that something preceded the proposed "initial state", but the initial state is applied as a boundary, because what is posterior to it is what is being studied.
Quoting Relativist
This doesn't even make sense to me. We describe and understand the activities of natural things through the use of laws. But laws cannot cause natural things to behave the way they do, because this would require that the things could read, interpret, and feel inclined to obey the natural laws. How does this make any sense to you, to think that natural things are somehow deciding to obey some set of laws, and act accordingly?
Quoting Relativist
Why do i need to present you with a theory about this? Isn't it just sufficient to say that human beings simply do not know why things behave the way that they do? And, that it would be foolish to pretend that they did? What would be the point of me offering up a theory, when I readily accept as fact, that me, nor any other human being, has even the vaguest idea, or any sort of knowledge at all, concerning why things behave the way that they do.
It seems pretty silly to me to think about the subject in such a black and white way. Some people clearly know more about why things behave as they do, than do other people.
How so? Do you mean that you know more about why you behave the way that you do, than I know about why you behave the way that you do? But we're talking about "things" plural, and that would only be knowing about the behaviour of one thing.
Do you think that someone who knows about laws of gravitation, and knows how to apply some universal laws of gravitation, knows more about why things fall, then the person who only knows that they fall because of gravity?
I answer your challenges to the best of my ability, but not always to your liking. Ive been here for a decade and I know where the boundary lines are in terms of philosophical commitments, that anything that could be considered religious is outside that boundary. Especially when it comes to you. Make no mistake, Ive learned a lot from your posts, but about science, not about philosophy, which is mainly of instrumental value to pragmatism. (Incidentally, here is a report about Stevensons activities.)
But my argument is that time is generated from rotation. The first time that something could go around in a circle and so be different from the first time something was also going off in straight line of the same scale.
This is of course the quick and dirty account. But its based on the maths of the symmetries underpinning quantum field theory. How SO(3) breaks down into its double cover of SU(2). You can get the fluctuation that is a vector gauge boson. A particle that exists as it has the dimensional structure that is an action in a direction. A translational degree of freedom which carries with it a transverse plane of rotation - a spin that cashes out an intrinsic energy. The constant field strength of a quantum oscillator.
And even this is still the quick and dirty account. Much more maths is involved. And I agree that physics hasnt been able to fully resolve the issue of what time is at the Planck scale.
Indeed, most simply run classical time straight through the Planckscale and through its final singularity point to come out the other side. Quantum magic is used to paper over the brief disappearance from view and a mirror version of our universe is then discovered emerging in this other classical time dimension.
But I prefer approaches that deal with what happens at the Planckscale and its unit 1 description of the Universe where the classical and the quantum bend into each other so to speak. A singularity is avoided. We instead have a symmetry breaking in terms of the Planck triad of constants, c, G and h. Spacetime extent emerges in conjunction with quantum mechanical content. And c sets the fundamental beat of doubling and halving - doubling of radius and halving of energy density.
Time is emergent as the exponential curve of expanding and cooling this creates. A first moment that is immediately followed by a second moment twice the global scale and half the local energy density. Another period doubling gives you a x4 and x1/4. And so on in powerlaw fashion.
As a fundamental way of looking at the ticking cosmic clock, its taken about 7 billion years to achieve the latest period doubling - a doubling of the cosmic horizon coupled to a fall in the Universes temperature from about 5 degrees K to 2.7 degrees today.
So time emerged as part of the Planckscale package. What is remarkable is that a clock was set ticking that marked out its moments as geometric growth - the period doubling of a thermal process, or a doubling of spacetime extent and quantum mechanical content. And that this metronomic beat was not disrupted too much by the fact that its contents was evolving its state.
A hot relativistic plasma broke to become a cold comoving and gravitating dust. Matter could suddenly go slower than light and that did indeed change the cosmic expansion rate/dilution rate by a whole order of magnitude. Radiation dilutes at the fourth power as it also redshifts in the time direction while matter dilutes at only the third power. If it wasnt for the appearance of dark energy, the cosmic clock of time would have gone right off its track. There wouldnt have been enough gravity exerted by the material contents to continue a smooth doubling-halving through the current matter dominated period of cosmic history.
But then dark energy kicks us in the opposite direction. It now both accelerates us back up to the original geometric or logarithmic beat of time and then overshoots. Time again will break down and effectively come to an end as the cosmic horizon becomes frozen in place and no more temperature fall becomes possible.
So even if you cant follow these details, you can see how time is an emergent description of what the universe is doing as a material system. The basic period doubling clock relies on matter being in a critical balance as described under inflation and the Lambda-CDM concordance model.
And the reality is that even with dark matter, the Universe was 70% light in this regard. The spring driving the cosmic clock was only a third wound up. The fact that mass condensed out of the radiation flow was a boon as that did something to reorganise the passing of time within a now comoving reference frame. Then dark energy adds its new upward flick where time is halted by a horizon. Unless you want to think of its as continuing in some still more transformed way as the superluminal expanse that flows on over the cosmic horizon.
There is a boundary between philosophy as making rational sense of the world and philosophy as making shit up. Philosophy is critical thinking. And it should be applied with full rigour to all our social narratives. Then let the cards fall where they may.
Religion is generally fine as the useful myths that a society organises itself by. To the degree that society is just its own thing, it can be as fictional as it pleases. But if a society has to exist in the world, then it needs to pay attention to this global fact. Even if it just shifts to faction, the narrative has to work in the sense of promoting functional behaviour at the collective social scale.
So religion is fine to the degree it works in this pragmatic sense. We are social animals. We do need to be bound by a collective world model to all become the productive inhabitants of this world. A transcending narrative is a basic requirement of social-semiosis.
But are religions good at adapting to changing circumstance? The Anglican Church certainly seems so. Belief in anything is optional. Social cohesion and public service is at the centre of what it does. Buddhism and Confusicanism likewise might be equally progressive within their own social contexts. I'm not sure anyone wants to be run under the rule of mullahs or evangelicals any time soon.
Or maybe that is my mistake as I have enjoyed all the benefits of a progressive and pragmatic social order. I feel no urge to go back to the certainties of life as lived in previous centuries.
But yeah. It is not that I rule out even children recalling past lives. As a pragmatist, I just weigh the evidence for or against. I spent a few years deliberately looking into all the fringe science looking at telepathy, hypnosis, spiritualism and whatever. Especially where it was being done under laboratory conditions. I even took part in experiments to get a taste of how thing were operated.
So I have no problem at all with science investigating the various species of idealist belief. But I've followed closely the results from when that was done. This is all familiar terrain. Been there and done that. Heard any amount of equivocation in the process while also agreeing that science can't pretend to prove the negative. It can only claim to have constrained the scope for doubt. Or in terms of the fringe, the scope for belief in its claims.
You can't even discuss it without becoming antagonistic, never mind that I have endeavoured to maintain a civil discourse throughout our debates.
A salient question. My take is that we are better off without the idea of overarching values, because that leaves us with the freedom to create our own values. This is not to refer to the pragmatic values that are essential to community functioning, but to say that those values don't need to be presented as given by a transcendent/ divine lawgiver.
That's an unjustified conclusion. The evidence implies either an infinite series or something unique to initiate the series.
Quoting Metaphysician UndercoverBecause an initial state (a unique thing) with potential to produce a subsequent state is also consistent with the evidence. So you need a rational reason to rule this out.
I think it's more likely that you can't see what anything in religions mean, except for in the social sense, of how they help society hang together. Of course the religious will say that there's another dimension altogether, which is symbolised (and dogmatized) in various forms and lexicons. But if you can't see that there's anything real to be conveyed then it's all equivocation and waffle as far as you're concerned.
If that is a thought that comforts you, OK.
I will state the obvious in that we have this freedom as a right and then the responsibility to exercise it as a fact. Modern society reformed itself to become an open market of value making.
That was working not too bad before social media came along and pushed the consensus beyond a hierarchical balance and into dysfunctional polarisation. Two sides now only wanting to cancel each other out.
Yea, the problem of ideology and dogmatism, political or religiousthe inevitable polemicus and them. Even if you offer a rational critique of an ideology, you are automatically cast by the ideologue or the dogmatist as ignorant or viciousas "one of them".
Some people develop areas of expertise, e.g. auto mechanics and MDs.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Do you really think that is an accurate claim about yourself? Or do you recognize that an MD is apt to know more than most people, about why your body behaves the way it does?
You are mischaracterising what I said. I said I was giving you the benefit of the doubt. That doesn't mean I think we're both right. Of course I think you're wrong.
I previously told you I do not consider truth relative. It was irrational (and rude) to ignore this. If you didn't understand, you should have asked.
There is only one set of truths, but there are no oracles to reveal it. All we have are our rational faculties, and the limited set of facts available to us. As I've also argued, most rational choices are inferences to best explanation (IBE) made on the evidence we have considered. Unlike deduction, IBE is not sufficient to prove conclusively that we're correct. Another's opinion may be equally rational, but based a different set of evidence and background beliefs*. This is sufficient reason to reserve judgement. I expressed this in a positive way, out of politeness.
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*This is the only "relativism" I have in mind with my screen name: we make our epistemic judgements relative to our background beliefs. This statement is neutral to the one set of actual truths, and doesn't entail making background beliefs beyond questioning. This may seem trivially true, but we often overlook it when having a discussion on controversial topics.
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Quoting Wayfarer
"Mainly"? My perception is that you've mainly asked questions that demonstrated you don't understand physicalism, and have reacted in ways that suggest you aren't interested in understanding it. You certainly don't grasp my perspective, so you aren't positioned to cast a rational judgement on it.
Our approaches are different: I start with the general facts about the world, whereas you start with some assumed framework on the structure of cognition: a framework that is untethered to any clear facts about the world- it's just about the way things seem to you after having considered various other mind-centric approaches. My problem with this approach is that your starting point is on shaky grounds - introspection, speculation, and rationalization. You have yet to acknoweldge any facts about the extra-mental world.
Does consideration of phenomenology lead you to reserve judgement on the inferences of science? Because if you were as confident of those facts as most people are, you would acknowledge the reasonableness of starting with those facts and seeking meta-explanations of them. Those facts have stronger epistemic support than any speculative theory on the structure of cognition.
Quoting Wayfarer
Everything that exists is an object. "Object" is synonymous with "existent". This doesn't imply we don't relate also to them as fellow human beings. They still exist.
Quoting Wayfarer
Read more carefully. I didn't "define" it this way, I said I "made sense of it" this way. Sure, this was because of my background framework (Catholic education). But you seem to agree there are no "spiritual/supernatual objects" - so you have no basis for claiming I'm wrong to rule this out. Doing so does not preclude the spiritual/supernatural being manifested in different ways. I can entertain this - if you can make a good case for it.
Quoting Wayfarer
The perception of objects is innate (perhaps also influenced by culture), not shaped by science education. Science objectifies additional perceived aspects of realty, but cognitively grounded in our innate sense.
That's great that there are alternative philosophical traditions that would have a different framework. That vague fact doesn't falsify our natural framework. You'd have to present a specific framework and show how it is superior.
Quoting Wayfarer
What you wrote seems consistent with what I've said.
The SEP Article on the Philosophy of Mathematics would be worth a read. I particularly liked this observation:
[I]"Bernays observed that when a mathematician is at work she naively treats the objects she is dealing with in a platonistic way. Every working mathematician, he says, is a platonist (Bernays 1935). But when the mathematician is caught off duty by a philosopher who quizzes her about her ontological commitments, she is apt to shuffle her feet and withdraw to a vaguely non-platonistic position. This has been taken by some to indicate that there is something wrong with philosophical questions about the nature of mathematical objects and of mathematical knowledge."[/i]
But the article gives a variety of perspectives.
Quoting Wayfarer
There are 2 relevant senses of uncertainty:
1) fallibilism: we can't be certain of many facts
2) quantum uncertainty.
Neither of these favors or disfavors my ontology vs others. These uncertainties apply to ANY theory: And yet, you seem to think the associated "vagueness" only applies to physicalism! No ontological theory can be established with certainty, and all viable theories have to be consistent with quantum mechanics - if it's to be treated as factual, rather some misguided consequence of our cultural history.
The irony is that you're treating the science of quantum mechanics as factual, while simultaneously criticizing the scientific framework as "speculative". Which is it? Do you accept facts established by science?
Quoting Wayfarer
Nice and neat = not vague. Indeed, the metaphysical theory is a nice neat system, that's robust enough to be consistent with science despite theory falsification/revision/replacement.
Now you're revealing your attitude toward science as "speculative". So...you regard the claims of physics as speculations on par with pseudo-science and conspiracy theories?
Many posts ago I mentioned that my metaphysical theory goes hand in hand with my epistemology. My epistemology respects IBEs. This provides an idealized basis for evaluating conspiracy theories, opinions on current events, historical theories, and nearly every aspect of everyday judgement. I believe that, when applied properly, it leads to more rational judgements- as well as decisiveness. It also leads me to be open-minded, willing to challenge my beliefs based on new information. Of course, because my beliefs form a "nice and neat" package, some of my views aren't easily changed- many logically related beliefs are involved, forming a coherent world view. My ontological theory comprises a portion of this world view; I adopted it as an IBE, finding it consistent with all the rest of my beliefs.
The claims of science are IBEs with strong support. That seems undeniable. They are about as rock-solid as an IBE can be, because they have been tested and verified. Even these can be wrong, but that gives us even more reason to be suspicious of speculations with a less secure epistemic basis. So WHY should I NOT embrace the metaphysical theory that best accounts for these scientific "facts"?
On the other hand, if your skepticism is so extreme that you can't accept the claims of science, you're left with very little that you can claim as belief, since little is as strongly supported. That's not irrational, but it's a dead end. So when I asked this:
Quoting Relativist
Rather than answer, you responded with:
Quoting Wayfarer
A non-answer. Here's more questions you haven't answered:
Quoting Relativist
Quoting Relativist
Quoting Relativist
ALL you've done is to point to reasons to think various claims may be wrong: they're framework dependent; shaped by culture or history; or it's simply that other possibilities can't be ruled out. But you haven't provided an alternative that could produce a "better explanation", and you haven't proposed an alternative to IBE in theory choice.
Returning to the first point, about me giving you the benefit of the doubt on having rational views, I'll add this. It appears you have almost no beliefs about ontology; you are mired in skepticism. That's not irrational, per se, but I can't see how you can apply this level of skepticism consistently across all aspects of the world that you deal with.
Quoting Wayfarer
You omitted the relevant portion of the quote. I highlighted it in bold.
We are part of the natural world; we were produced by it, and we interact with it constantly (cause-effect relationships). The question is: how do we not fit the definition? Support your answer with evidence, and don't give it in terms of some framework that you can't fully defend as complete and coherent.
Bingo. :lol:
But rotation is an activity which requires time. This puts time as prior to rotation. Rotation cannot get started without the passing of time. Therefore it is impossible that rotation is the cause of time, or that time is generated from rotation.
The logic I use above is the same type of logic by which Aristotle demonstrates that eternal circular motion is physically impossible in De Caelo. He starts by showing how eternal circular motion is logically possible. All the mathematical principles, the Ideals, are consistent and sufficient to support the reality of eternal circular motion. However, he then goes on to explain how any circular motion would involve a body which is moving in that motion. And, the body would consist of matter. The material body, would have been generated in the past, and would corrupt in the future, therefore the eternal circular motion is physically impossible.
The same logic can be applied to your claim that time is generated from rotation. Rotation is an activity which requires something which rotates. The thing which is rotating is a physical thing, a temporal object, existing in time. Therefore time is prior to rotation, rotation occurs within time, and it is impossible that time is generated from rotation.
Quoting apokrisis
All this happens in time. it is not an account of how time is generated.
Quoting apokrisis
No, i don't see how it is possible that time is emergent from something material. And, you should be able to understand this as well. All material things are temporal, having their beginnings and endings in time. As demonstrated by Aristotle's argument in Bk 9 of metaphysics, which I referred to, anything eternal must be actual.
Quoting wonderer1
But these are specifics, this type of thing, or that type, according to the area of expertise. What we were talking about is why things (in general) behave the way that they do.
Quoting wonderer1
Yes, I really think it is an accurate claim. And, I do not think that an MD knows more about why I behave the way that I do, then I do.
Quoting Relativist
This is not true. Evidence indicates that becoming, or change, is a process of transition. Therefore the series ends, but it does not end abruptly at a point, it transitions to something else. This is neither an infinite series nor a unique point which initiates the series, it is a process of change.
Quoting Relativist
I explained the rationale behind ruling out the "initial state". An "initial state" is an ideal which is arbitrarily assigned in the application of systems theory. As an "ideal" it has nothing which directly corresponds with it in the physical world. Take the eternal circular motion referred to above, in my reply to apokrisis, as an example. It is a logical possibility, and an ideal, but it is actually physically impossible. It is common that ideals are actually physically impossible, because the physical world lacks the perfection of the ideal. But that does not make the ideals useless. Many are extremely useful, for all sorts of purposes. However, when it comes to cosmology, and we assign the ideal as a fundamental property of the universe, when the ideal is actually physically impossible, this is a mistake which is very misleading. It is sometimes called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Both you and apokrisis make this same mistake, of designating an ideal which is actually physically impossible, as a fundamental property of the universe. I believe this type of mistake is common to all forms of physicalism.
Your reply makes no sense. You agree there wasn't an infinite series, and you had asserted that this entails a "God" initiating it- which is something unique.
This inference has no implication at all as to the characteristics of this (so called) God. All we know is that this "God" is some thing that kicked off the sequence of universe states.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Non-sequitur. Even if the universe was created by Yahweh, it entails an initial state of Yahweh (and nothing else). So it's self-defeating to rule out an initial state.
Sure, how does that mean that what I said makes no sense? It seems to make complete sense to me. There is something which caused the reality of the universe which we know and understand, but we do not know anything else about this cause.
Quoting Relativist
This supposed conclusion is contrary to the argument. The argument demonstrates that the "thing" you refer to as prior to all the physical states, is explicitly not a state. That is why God is understood as immaterial. To characterize it as a state is to demonstrate that you are either failing to understand it, or refusing to accept it. Judging by the rest of our discussion, I think you are refusing. I think you actually grasp the force with which the argument disproves the physicalism of your faithful devotion, and so you practise denial because you are not prepared for apostasy.
What made no sense is why you disagreed with my statement:
Quoting Relativist
You responded, "This is not true".
And yet, you now actually seem to agree (you said, "sure").
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You have only established that the "thing" is unique, in that it differs from the series of transitional universe states you regard as the evidence. Now you're using the terms "physical" and "immaterial" but haven't defined them. I infer that "physical" applies to each of those transitional universe states, "immaterial" applies to the unique thing. So applying these labels adds no information. I don't see how you could justifiably add information, because the evidence only points them being different. This is already captured with "unique".
[Quote]To characterize it as a state is to demonstrate that you are either failing to understand it, or refusing to accept it.[/quote]
I can't understand a claim of yours that you haven't adequately explained. You seem to be using the word, "state" different from the way I defined it.
I gave you a hypothetical scenario involving the hypothetical deity, Yahweh, which entailed an initial state of Yahweh (sans universe). I'll add detail so you can identify what you disagree with:
Yahweh (sans universe) causes the series of transitional states of the universe; causation entails a temporally prior cause and temporally posterior effect. Hence there is a series of states, sequenced in time, that begins with Yahweh (sans universe).
In this scenario, Yahweh sans universe is indeed a state, per my definition of state. You haven't provided an alternate definition.