Heh. Those are some of the choices.

Presentism does work.

So do the others.

How do we decide?

Eh. Only if you're a presentist.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time/

Who says it didn't? 139 current members of Congress voted not to certify the election result. They're still there doing Trump's bidding. The Jan 6th coup attempt is not finished — Wayfarer

The movement Trump is a part of is not finished. It existed prior to Trump incarnating himself as their messiah and is better organized due to his influence. He even delivered on an old promise of the Republicans with Roe v. Wade so the Republicans have a reason to like him -- he's clearly electable, and he gets things done.

But I think it better to look at January 6th as a defeat rather than a success. If he would have had the popular will or the military on his side then things could have gone differently, but since there's organized resistance, they did not succeed at keeping Trump as president.

How much do you expect and or fear that a strong fascist moment could be organized within the next 5 years? — BC

I certainly fear it, though I don't know what to expect. I was surprised when Trump won. I have no doubt that he could win again, and I have no doubt that the fascists support him.

But I'm not sure that there's the popular will for fascism to support it. Wouldn't January 6th have worked if there was?

Still -- 5 years is a long time for predictions in the United States. So while I have no expectations I feel some fear of the fascist trends.

Time is a great topic.

I began to notice differences in conceptions in time when I started getting into historiography. As you note there are many models of time.

I believe past events must at least exist. What is non-physical about the Earth forming in the distant past? Or weather events? It seems to me that the mountains of today were physical yesterday, or at least as physical as they are today. Would time rob them of that physicality because we've moved past them, or do they remain physical even though it was yesterday?

The philosophy I'm interested in recognises the empirical reality of past events, the pre-history of life before man and so on. But the reality that is imputed to them, is still imputed by an observing mind - yours, mine and whomever else considers the matter. The question is, is temporarility itself truly independent of any observing mind? And if the answer is yes, according to what scale or perspective is it so? Time - the measurement of duration - seems to me to depend on scale or perspective, and that is what it provided by the observing mind. None of which is to deny the reality of the fossil record. — Wayfarer

Time seems as independent as anything else in empirical reality, but if we're talking about transcendental idealism, for instance, then it seems the answer is both yes and no -- time is independent of my observing mind in the sense that I can have incorrect judgments about the form of our intuition, but it also just is a part of our mental structuring of the world (so it wouldn't even make sense to claim dependence as much as identity).

I don't know, though, and I remain uncertain how one might go about deciding such a thing. It seems like a question we can ask but that doesn't have much of an answer if we want to claim to know.

Just what the physics profession thinks is the state of physical matter. I think quantum physics says matter exists in a somewhat fuzzy present 'moment'. — Mark Nyquist

And so World War 1 does not physically exist?

Fair. No need for argument, and if I'm missing the fundamentals then I have homework to do.

Any suggestions on that front? No promises... too many interests and all that. But I'd like to correct myself if I'm missing fundamentals.

Hopefully more than a word problem, though that's possible.

Fossils are a good example. Did they just happen to form, or are they present because they have a material past?

I believe many things about the past -- the before now -- which are about the physical world. So I figure that must be physical, even if not present. (That dodoes existed, for instance)

By a moment of time do you mean a duration of time? — Mark Nyquist

I was hoping "moment" wouldn't come under question :D -- purposefully ambiguous, at this point, though inspired by Hegel. Moments have a structure -- they are populated with both members and relationships between the members and between the relationships. But how we go about defining these things in concrete instances, I think, will become controversial as we work out their implications so I don't want to make a definition just yet.

I don't think moments have to be uniform, even within the same set of moments -- so some of them could be instantaneous, and some of them could be for 1 minute, or we could also rigidly apply a 1-minute-per-moment definition From the Beginning, and numerate all moments by the minute for as far back as we are able and call that moment 0. As long as we understand one another in a particular instance that's good enough.

Also moments don't have to be numerated. "Alex walked to the mailbox. Alex waved to the neighbors" -- the logic of stories makes it to where the first sentence precedes the second sentence. It's understood that time passes, and it passes in a manner which is not numerated but sensible. I would include examples of narrative time like that, if we're to work out a logic of time.

Also from a physicalist perspective the past and future don't physically exist. I use past and future as known non-physicals. I think it's an argument that supports physicalism because brain state existing in the physical present can support the ideas of past and future . — Mark Nyquist

I can see the perspective for the future, but I'm inclined to think that the past physically exists from a physicalist perspective -- noting a difference between existence and presence.

I think discussing the claim that the next moment supervenes upon this moment could branch in a lot of directions. It doesn't make sense at face value, I agree. But I think you can make some sense of it. In terms of A properties supervening on B properties, there's probably a wiggle room for calling objects zeroth order properties. — fdrake

There's a wiggle room there too I think. The type of ordering between moments is like "less than or equal to", so a reflexive, transitive and asymmetric relation. So presumably any collection of property classes with a supervenience relation (which is comprehensible), if that supervenience relation is reflexive, transitive and asymmetric, is an example of a supervenience relation which is precisely the type of order between moments.

An example of that would be { biological (supervenes on) chemical (supervenes on) physical }. That's reflexive - no biological changes without biological changes. Asymmetric - every element has a unique predecessor. And transitive - the biological also supervenes upon the physical.

To be sure, it's possible there are supervenience relations which don't behave like orders, but that is one which does behave like an order.

So if you wanted to make the claim that {moment 1 (supervenes on) moment 2 (supervenes on) moment 3}, it's the same order relation as {biological (supervenes on) chemical (supervenes on) physical}. So it can't be disqualified on that basis alone.

Another rejoinder would be that "moments aren't properties", but you can modify the sequence to explicitly make them properties:

{properties at moment 1 (supervenes on) properties at moment 2 (supervenes on) properties at moment 3}

Which seems to parry that.

And as for supervenience changes necessarily being causal? The supervenience relation is reflexive. You get no changes in type A properties without changes in A type properties, but a given change of an A type property is identical with that change, not a cause of that change.

There might be an angle of criticism regarding the sense of possibility. What are the "possible worlds" for moments which the modal necessity of supervenience would be tested upon? Something I'm still pondering. — fdrake

I have had many thoughts on this, and it seems to come down to how we want to parse a logic of time.

I want to say that the ordered set of events does not rely upon supervenience in ordering those events. Further, in order for a supervenience relationship to hold then there are usually two kinds at work -- the mental supervenes upon the physical, the chemical supervenes upon the physical. What we'd have to do for moments is ensure that the supervenience relationship is between two kinds which still hold.

I thought about the difference between the A-series and the B-series of time and how, perhaps, the A-series could be claimed to supervene upon the B-series, and also that this would be a kind of support for physicalism. But how that maps -- I'm not sure.

But I think what I'd say is that the events in the moment defined from 1200 to 1201 do not map in a supervenient relationship to the events in the moment defined from 1201 to 1202. Supposing the same indexical reference then the events could be ordered as before and after, but if moment 1 is the A-properties across all of existence and moment 2 is the B-properties then it seems fairly obvious that if something changes at moment 1 that does not necessitate a change in moment 2, and also it's worth noting that because of the indexical being the same these are the same "kind" of time.

But that's about as far as I've been able to take it in a day. So I think where I'm still at is that the ordering relationship between moments in the same set of moments will not have supervenient relationships to one another, but something like "is before" on the same index.

(EDIT: Though it's worth noting that the sets which are within a moment could have supervenient relationships to one another or also to future versions of the same set. It's only the moments themselves, as an object with properties, that I think do not supervene)

I think we can always resort to "I don't know" or "I am uncertain" or some other sort of negation while simultaneously admitting our strongest beliefs or the ones we think most likely or best supported.

So the mind-body problem can be made to cohere with physicalism, but what is a persuasive argument such that those who disagree with physicalism will feel the need to respond?

I agree the ability to imagine pictures in one's mind is not an exception to physicalism.

It's the "I don't have any idea how it's done" part that raises doubts. Imagining can be made to cohere with physicalism, but coherence isn't exactly persuasive to anyone who disagrees with physicalism. So is it a good argument for physicalism?

No catch -- just self report. Some people report not being able to imagine things. Aldous Huxley mentions it in his The Doors of Perception -- that mescaline enabled him to understand what people were saying when they said that they imagined things.

It'd be interesting if there was some causal correlate to this, and other, abilities or tendencies, wouldn't it?

That might constitute a argument for physicalism -- but to establish supervenience it'd have to be universal (or, for science, pretty universal-ish looking), and we're just too ignorant at this point to be able to make that inference with respect to human being.

I, personally, can do this -- but not everyone can, though they understand the words.

Plate class macroscopic properties supervene on chemical structure level properties. — fdrake

Right, that's how I understand supervenience. "The plate" is the object with A-level properties, and "Chemical structure", including relative position, is the set of objects with B-level properties.

I guess strictly speaking all the events at moment 12:00 could supervene on the set of events at 11:59. If you think of classes of events and objects as properties of the stratum of events and objects which exist at a moment, you would get collections at 12:00 only changing if collections at 11:59 had changed. So assuming the collections are properties, I think that follows.

But there is something a bit iffy in taking those properties to be extensional? As in, the macroscopic properties of the plate seem specified by understanding a (defining?) intension toward it as a macroscopic object; manipulability, colour, texture... On the level of configurations of atoms and structure. Whereas the "structure" of a moment is just that it is an index. — fdrake

... Yeah, nevermind. Moments do not supervene upon moments. I was sort of thinking that one might work out causation this way, but then the more I thought about it the less sense I could make of it. Causes are events which preceed and necessitate effects -- themselves also events. Perhaps some two-level structure within events could have supervenience, like wars supervening upon soldiers, but there aren't two levels between moments -- they're at the same logical plane, and the before-after structure is an ordering of events to an index rather than a two-level structure.

... which is still too general to make a decision either way about physicalism. :D

This is mostly rambling. — fdrake

:D -- that's when we're digging into the good stuff, in terms of a conversation at least.

Do you think you can articulate a physicalism without a cause concept?

I gave it a thought and I can't do so -- but I can imagine the possibility.

There's an interstice between the above ambiguity and the supervenience discussion we're having. Supervenience isn't explicitly causal, is it. It's about necessary changes. Perhaps that could occur with a necessary correlation rather than a cause.

As an example, if someone has binge eating disorder, that could cause diabetes and damage to their teeth. Assuming that the only thing that influences that person's diabetes and teeth damage is the binge eating disorder, then you would have no diabetes changes without teeth damage changes, and vice versa [two supervenience relations], but no causal relationship between diabetes and tooth damage for that person.

Those two phenomena have a common cause as the stipulated only influence on their behaviour, though. If you lived in a world where you haven't seen the common cause [the binge eating disorder], you could still perhaps see that that person's tooth damage changed only when their diabetes changed. So those two would still have an establish-able supervenience relationship without establishing a causal intermediary. — fdrake

I think it's interesting to introduce a time-dimension to ideas of supervenience -- the A-level and the B-level can be differentiated time-wise (and note how "time-wise" can mean 1 second, 1 minute, 2 hours, etc.) -- but my understanding of A-level and B-level supervenience is more with respect to objects I think? Moving a plate also moves the number of atoms it's comprised of (though surely at least one atom of silicon or calcium carbonate we had considered "the plate" also rubs off onto our palm? ... the oddity of attempting to use scientific statements in philosophy...) -- but does a moment supervene on the next moment? Maybe, but it seems different. (also I must admit to still struggling with supervenience)

I wouldn't commit to that statement. It could be both a way of thinking and a thing in the world.

Though I think if causation is real it would be a relation rather than a thing, if I'm going to be picky.

I'm not sure I understand this. How is science supposed to work if we can't count on past observations to tell us anything about the future? We've been testing Newton's laws for centuries, but can we accept them now as, in some imperfect way, describing how the world works and will work in the future? We can't if Hume is right (and then he has the whole part about burning all the books that claimed to have knowledge based on past observations, which I did think was a good joke on his part). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Short version: Not only can we count on past observations, we can't not think in terms of causation by our very nature.


Quote from Hume:

Should it here be asked me, whether I sincerely assent to this argument, which I seem to take such pains to inculcate, and whether I be really one of those sceptics, who hold that all is uncertain, and that our judgment is not in any thing possest of any measures of truth and falshood; I should reply, that this question is entirely superfluous, and that neither I, nor any other person was ever sincerely and constantly of that opinion. Nature, by an absolute and uncontroulable necessity has determined us to judge as well as to breathe and feel; nor can we any more forbear viewing certain objects in a stronger and fuller light, upon account of their customary connexion with a present impression, than we can hinder ourselves from thinking as long, as we are awake, or seeing the surrounding bodies, when we turn our eyes towards them in broad sunshine. Whoever has taken the pains to refute the cavils of this total scepticism, has really disputed without an antagonist, and endeavoured by arguments to establish a faculty, which nature has antecedently implanted in the mind, and rendered unavoidable.

But any more would just totally derail the thread, I think.

Popper is worth bringing up in relation to the topic of physicalism because that's another philosophical position which would divorce metaphysics from science.

You are correct. I can't think of the right term for it. But I can frame it in a question to Hume: "what would it look like to observe causation?" There are all sorts of complex, nuanced issues with causation that have cropped up since Hume's day, but let's ignore those and just focus on billiard balls bouncing or dominoes falling or what have you. When we see one domino topple another, Hume says we aren't seeing cause. But what conceivable observation would qualify as "observing cause" in those cases?

It seems to me that, if one domino hitting another really does cause the second domino to fall, what we see is exactly what cause might look like. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think I'd say that I see a domino hitting another domino, and that is real -- it's the bit when we start saying cause that gets funny.

But, also, since we've agreed causation doesn't support physicalism, I think I'd say this is worthy of another thread. Causation has been popping up.

I don't think science needs to claim that what appear to be the invariances of nature must of necessity forever remain invariant. — Janus

I agree -- I don't think scientists are prone to claim this, or that it's necessary for scientific knowledge.

As far as science knows they have up until now remained invariant, so it can proceed on the basis of "if such and such law remains invariant, we can expect to observe this and that or whatever".

Even if the laws remained the same forever and ever it's always the case that there could be some other intervening cause or a conjunction of causes that's unknown and grouped under a single name to the effect.

While I eschew falsificationism I think Popper captured something in positing it as a criteria for science which is that while we have some good beliefs what makes them scientific is that they can be defeated by evidence rather than supported by evidence -- there's always the possibility of finding something later which undermines our theory. So rather than assuming that laws are invariant I think the more common assumption is that they are good enough for now until someone comes along and points out where we messed up, and on and on the scientific project will go.

I agree with all that, particularly that cause alone cannot act as support for physicalism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Cool.

The question of science re Hume as a whole is sort of interesting, as his attack on induction would seem to cut the legs out from underneath the entire scientific project.

Another way to read him is to say that if both Hume is right and science works, then science must not proceed by induction.

One of the things I've considered about Hume's position on cause is that it seems to be somewhat guilty of begging the question. If one billiard ball really does cause another to move, then watching them collide is observing cause. His position on cause then ends up being heavily reliant on his position on induction holding up.

I don't think he's guilty of begging the question, though yes I think that his position on skepticism follows from previous positions in the book -- he doesn't start with skepticism but ends the first part of his treatise with it.

But what vindicates him is that we do, in fact, change our beliefs about causation as we learn more, especially in the sciences. The overturning and re-overturning of belief gets along with his epistemology, at least insofar that science has anything to say about causation.

Notice the difference between "smoking causes cancer" and "The assassination of Franz Ferdinand caused World War I" What is the same between these such that we should say that they're both using "causation"?

There's a difference between making a distinction between correlation and causation, which I agree with, and making the metaphysical case for the reality of causation. One is a bit of scientific pedagogy that points out that it's too easy to see patterns so make sure you get a good one (and what a good one is depends upon the particular science, experiment, task). The other is the philosophy of metaphysics. I think that it's a good thing to look at science in thinking of metaphysics, but we shouldn't assume they are one and the same. We'd need some basis of judgment to go from science to metaphysics.

Hume's argument regarding causation should be understood to put it in the place of custom and habit as opposed to saying we cannot use it. It's not that we cannot use causation -- as a human we have no choice but to think this way. It's just not a demonstrative science where the rules are certain and infallible. Rather we are accustomed to believe in causation, but our fallibility makes this an uncertainty. Further the only means which we have to correct belief is the same means we had in forming the belief -- an appeal to reason or the senses. But since our reasoning is fallible even this correction can be incorrect, and so we are forced to concede that cause -- being a non-demonstrative science, but a case of probabilistic reasoning -- is a habit of thought that cannot be justified to the level of necessity we are habituated to think it has.

Also I'll reiterate the point that even if we grant causation as a metaphysical reality that this won't secure physicalism given the Kantian frame for causation -- if causation is necessary and universal then that could be seen as a reason to believe in Transcendental Idealism.

Read the words of Hume and awake from your slumbers! You have nothing to lose but your chains! :D

Supposing science uses cause, that does not then in turn mean that causation is real. Further if cause is real then that could even be read as a strike against physicalism given the Transcendental Idealist interpretation of causation -- even if cause is real it could be that physicalism is false.

Curious. I'd taken reductionism within the sciences as granted - that physicalism would consider all the sciences variations on physics; after all, the crux of physicalism is that everything is just physics. — Banno

I think that it's the generally desired path, but that in terms of science texts that relationship is still being worked out. Not that it's an unreasonable belief that they cohere, even -- but there's no deduction of natural selection from physics, at least, so we'd have to specify this coherence in spelling out a physicalism.

But you perhaps can't derive society behaviour from atom behaviour. Even though you can argue persuasively that every societal change must be associated to a change in the chemical constituents of entities within that society... And if no constituents changed there could have been no societal change. That's an absence of a "bridge law" reduction, but within the scope of a supervenience physicalism. — fdrake

Nice. That's very clear.

Yes, it's a matter of perspective—I see it more as a case of those being better understand as physical, material or natural processes than as being "reduced to explained away" by that understanding. It doesn't seem to me that anything important is being lost or diminished by thinking that way. — Janus

I agree nothing is lost. Though I want to highlight the possibility of eliminative materialism. This is where the use of texts will become a little tricky, and controversial: if we were to set up a gradient between positions from the eliminative materialist to the non-reductive physicalist, what does the eliminative materialist eliminate? My thought is the non-reductive physicalist would accept at least some anthropology as worthy of ontological thought.

That was a hesitation for myself as well, so upon understanding that we're including those (and, I'm guessing, others like it) that works as a place to begin. There's a rich body of texts which serve as examples, and it's not like they're arbitrarily chosen -- generally if we're a physicalist we'll think that those texts are the most likely to be true, or that they're the best descriptions we have right now, or something like that.

Perhaps physicalism is the belief that these texts not only can, but should serve as a basis for metaphysical theses.

It's pretty clear isn't it? Evolutionary biology replaced the Biblical creation mythology, but it also elbowed aside a great deal of philosophy which had become attached to it as part of the cultural milieu. So it seems obvious to anyone here that mind evolves as part of the same overall process through which everything else evolves. And it's then easy to take the step that the human mind is a product of evolutionary processes in just the same way as are claws and teeth. Easy! What could be wrong with that? (That's why I'm an advocate of 'the argument from reason', although it's about as popular on this forum as a parachute in a submarine.) — Wayfarer

Oh, no, I wouldn't say it's clear. It seems to me that there are materialisms, even though there's a theme that runs through them. So instead of evolutionary biology replacing Biblical mythology we could say that the industrial revolution enabled human beings to recognize economic relationships in all things be it the church, state, or work -- just to contrast the two materialisms that I'm thinking through here.

With respect to the mind-body problem what makes it unclear is what that reduction is between, I think. It's not only hard to specify the relationship, it's even hard to specify what the relationship is between. Further we have a temptation to rely upon our own experiences when thinking about minds, but this has been shown repeatedly to be false, so on top of the ambiguity there is our own weakness in thinking through difficult problems that makes it a little unclear, at least.

Though if the theme holds that might be the beginnings to some clarity.

the idea is that the Universe was not planned or intentionally created and that mind emerged much later in the picture — Janus

That seems to me to be a uniting theme on materialism -- something, be it qualia, intentionality, mind, or spiritual things, is somehow reduced to or explained away as a physical, material, or natural process of things. (I'd include supervenience as a kind of reduction, so I mean that term broadly)

No worries, it's a weird idea to wrap your head around.

The economic form was different then so reality was different then.

The part that gets weird is before humanity, if you want to think of this in a common-sense way. For Marx I'd say that the dialectic plays out in nature as well, or at least this what I think is consistent in reading him. The economic is invoked because of our species-being.

The notion of a species-being is something which I think separates Darwin from Marx, though they also have some similar parallels. But come to think of the titular question Darwin is a good justification for materialism, I think: what was formally thought to have a spiritual force was reduced to the mechanisms of nature.

This notion of the mind not have effects, of the spiritual being reduced to cash-exchanges -- that's what makes this a kind of materialism, I think. Marx wants to reduce these things to the economic form, too.

Or the other way to read it would be more Marxist -- that you moving to Alaska to be a hunter-gatherer changes nothing about the economic form that allowed you to move to Alaska to become a hunter-gatherer which continues on.

Nope. Reality changed, but that's not a lift off from reality.

The material is the social, and the social is the economic. So the material is the economic. Whether you conceive of that like Marx does or whether you conceive of it like USians do that's the core idea I'm putting forward. It makes sense as a better priority for the real because it cannot be ignored in the same way that the mind-body problem can.

I think a little more than that. Not only that it has multiple meanings, but that this meaning is better than the one set out by the mind-body problem, which is basically intractable from my sights. I don't think there's a good argument to be had for materialism if you begin with the mind-body problem.

Ehhh... not quite. Rather that materialism can be defined by more than the mind-body problem, as can philosophy. Marx was, after all, a philosopher.

It only has a meaning within a context or a background of some sort. One context is the mind-body problem, and there the contrast is with mind, where the material is associated with the body. In Marx the material is dialectical, though different readings of Marx will emphasize different aspects. The reading I'm putting forward here is the one which reads Marx as a Base-Superstructure theorist such that the economy forms the base for all the social forms that we see. It's only because we're typing on computers which are produced by an economy that this discussion can take place -- it's by having jobs and paying bills and participating in the economic form that we are able to have a philosophical conversation at all, and so it takes the priority of the real. It's these visceral sorts of appeals that make Marx's idea more defensible than variants based upon the mind-body problem; epiphenomenalism is easy to consider from afar, but I've got bills to pay and a job to do, and that's real regardless.

But others would say that this reality is not material, which is why I think you need Marx to call this a kind of materialism.

Mkay. Focus on the big-picture idea then. "dialectical materialism" because the main perspective thus far has been from the mind-body problem, and I'm attempting to point out that we can think of "materialism" in terms aside from the mind-body problem, such as the terms Marx presents. He's pretty much as die-hard materialist as you can be, but the problem of consciousness is not one for him.

Between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

The big-picture idea is that the material is the social world we inhabit. So, given that this is a materialism, no immaterial. "dialectical" because the idea that the social world is the economy is Marx's, and so credit where due.