I'm going to make a few remarks addressing some of the arguments in play, then I'm out of this thread. I have more productive things to do than waste time in a dualist cesspool. Philosophy is about reasons and arguments, but it's also about communities and cliques. I have enjoyed demolishing Wayfarer's terrible arguments in two separate rounds now, but I have no further interest in repeating myself to people who have a misguided sense of certainty, blissfully unaware that they will never find it. I refute the central claims of the dualists in the following paragraphs.

On Aristotle and time. Yes I am familiar with Aristotle's thoughts on time. What I am telling you is that there is absolutely no basis, rational or empirical, for deriving our understanding of time from Aristotle, anymore than one should look at him for inspiration on why the Sun revolves around the Earth. Someone who got every major argument about physical reality wrong should be greeted with major skepticism. You are obviously content to wallow in your metaphysical delusions, so instead of greeting him with skepticism, you ask me silly questions that can never be adequately answered. The dichotomy you have invented in your head is a false choice because it asks me to pick between Nonsense #1 and Nonsense #2. Your inability to recognize why your question cannot be adequately addressed just by looking at time alone, as some abstraction apart from the rest of spatial reality, is very much a sign that you need to stop reading Aristotle and start watching a YouTube video on relativity. Of course I could provide such resources, but I already know that it's a pointless exercise. The passage or the measurement of time cannot be analyzed without the broader context of space. Period. So you can keep asking this useless question a million times, rephrase it a million times, and you would still be wrong a million times.

In GR, spacetime is very much a dynamical part of nature, so it is most definitely "a thing," assuming we all understand that word in the same way (see the end of this post about that issue). We also know observers in different gravitational fields measure the passage of time at different rates, because mass and energy, in distorting the curvature of space, also distort the nature of time. Also, denying the postulates of SR, including that observers in all reference frames measure the same speed of light, is tantamount to viewing time as an absolute ticking clock for all observers. Contrary to your drivel, you have in fact proposed that time exists as an absolute for everyone living anywhere. I know you missed all of this stuff in Aristotle, so I wanted to give you an update on things that were endlessly debated in physics 100 years ago.

There was some talk about quantum gravity as it relates to this problem, so let me address that real quick. Quantum gravity at this point is an umbrella term for many different theories and ideas, not all of which agree in their understanding of time. But I don't see how the canonical versions of quantum gravity help the Forms in any way. If spacetime is an emergent property of quantum entanglement, and if the Forms are "active" in spacetime, then that implies that the Forms are themselves just emergent properties of entanglement. In other words if you insist on putting the Forms in spacetime, then that requires the prior and foundational existence of entanglement. So you are making the operation of the Forms dependent on entanglement, and that brings up more questions about how they relate to physical reality. I have no idea what a metaphysics of that would look like, but I'm sure someone here does, because it's very easy to come up with nonsense when you don't care about evidence.

The conceivability arguments about the Forms and space are absolutely infantile, the result of doing too much imagining and too little thinking. First of all, there are very many people who have conceived of just time emerging. There are special versions of quantum gravity where precisely this happens, so it's just not true that it's inconceivable for time to emerge. The only thing that's true here is that you don't want to allow for time to emerge because it ruins your argument. But don't conflate your personal fantasies with what other people can conceive.

Let's consider another angle to your argument. Why can't I conceive of a material Form in non-spatial reality? Alternatively, how can you conceive of an immaterial Form in non-spatial reality? I mean try thinking of one right now. Whatever you thought of either had a material property or a spatial property. Suppose you thought of the number 3 in a completely black background. That does not mean you thought of a non-spatial property. It just means you put that number in empty space. You could have also placed the number in some other background entirely, but either way you are necessarily imagining the existence of spatial dimension. Maybe your 3 even has a color like white, but the only reason why it can have a color is because you have material experience of colors. And the same goes for whatever background you placed the 3 in. Your very imagination of that background having color is the result of material experience. Maybe you aren't picturing anything at all in your mind. Maybe you are just reciting the word for the number 3 over and over. But if so, what have you actually conceived of? All you would be doing is just repeating a word, and I know you don't actually mean to suggest that Forms are words! Thus I have demonstrated that this ridiculous argument falls apart completely.

The question over the existence of metaphysical reason is in some sense what the entire debate on this thread has been about. I have already demonstrated that mind-body dualism cannot be true in any substantive sense. And even philosophers like Chalmers, who fully accept the validity of the hard problem, have resorted to funny and clever labels in their quest to avoid materialism. They call themselves "naturalistic dualists" or "property dualists" or anything else that basically means materialism. Of course most serious philosophers have come around to materialism by now, agreeing with the central conclusions of modern neuroscience: the mind is a physical product of the brain, the operations of the mind depend on brain states, and consciousness cannot actually exist apart from a physical brain.

Let me briefly address the issue on reason, existence, and evidence. Here we have another futile attempt to argue against materialism through philosophical zombies. Richard Brown had the best refutation of this nonsense when he pointed out that the zombie argument is circular. To paraphrase his argument, imagine special creatures called "zoombies," which are nonphysically identical to human beings and lack phenomenal consciousness. Because we can conceive of zoombies, it's possible that they exist. If zoombies exist, then they clearly refute dualism because they show that consciousness is physical. Point being? You cannot use a priori arguments to settle this issue. You have to use evidence! I know that's a horrible idea for some philosophers, but it does give me comfort knowing that there are plenty of philosophers out there who still bother to think for more than ten seconds about this nonsense.

Meaning and reason represent a complex collection of mental operations that emerge in the brain as the latter interacts with the external world, forms memories and experiences, and develops new physical structures and patterns. This dynamical coupling between the brain and the external world is important because it's what allows the brain to learn language, to understand basic causation, to perceive differences, to notice motion, and to observe when things live or die, among many other features and abilities. And these experiences are then not just important, but absolutely foundational in the development of thoughts about existence, meaning, and reason. Additional metaphysical layers, about the independence of rational insight and all that, have no more explanatory power to add and are absolutely unnecessary.

Finally, it's worth noting for the record that this thread has still not reached an understanding of what is physical and what is not. All of the debates on this thread, including my posts, have relied on some hazy and contingent assumptions about what we mean by that term, but the debates reveal very clearly that we really have no clue. And that's ok to the extent that our debates are limited to analyzing certain parts of reality, but a more ambitious project would need a more concrete solution. Maybe apokrisis has provided one. I don't know, but I enjoyed the vigorous exchange of ideas.

You all take care.

I think there are some plausible points in your arguments. But I need to consider them more carefully before I can fully make a coherent judgment. Some of these arguments are not that familiar to me.

They are very much the product of the brain interacting with the world. You are just playing semantics now. The last refuge of the defeated.

Not really interested in that debate Marcus, sorry. But you should look up a few things on entropy, for fun if nothing else.

Apokrisis, if understanding Forms requires tying them to some kind of "energetic change," wouldn't that make them physical in some way?

Wayfarer, the law of identity and all logical principles were discovered by human minds, and after being so discovered were remembered and written down by future minds. So although they are true, they are still a product of the physical mind. The ability to recognize abstractions is a product of the physical mind as well. We have been over this already. Round 3? Or are you just going to keep repeating yourself until you have the last word?

Again, you are wrong in your foundational assumption that metaphysical reason exists. This is the error you need to correct in your thinking. And yes, I will always side with modern neuroscience instead of the fabrications spewing out of your brain.

The reason why we can have this debate is because we have brains and live in a society that has developed the Internet and computers. So very much a material process, once again.

Wayfarer, the capacity for abstract thinking develops from the physical structure of our brains, especially the high density of neurons in the cortex. This is why when we are children we do not have much capacity for abstract thought, if any. Then we grow up and our brains change, our knowledge of language increases, until the point where abstract thinking becomes possible around the early teen years (and even before to an extent).

The metaphysical reason you are talking about does not actually exist, except as a fabrication of your particular brain. We have been over this already.

I did not call you stupid. I called your arguments stupid, because they are.

As a dualist, you show be able to recognize the difference.

Wayfarer, the article you cited does not actually solve the problem. We already know why we can know truths and proofs: because of the physical structure of the brain.

I am very familiar with Kant. I just disagree with your terrible arguments about why reason precedes science and experience, when science and experience plainly demonstrate that reason codevelops with experience, and cannot exist apart from it.

How many other stupid arguments do you have in your bag of tricks? I can keep rebutting this nonsense for as long as you wish.

Furthermore, reason about what it means to exist cannot develop except through empirical experience. Our "rational operations" in the brain, to quote Wayfarer, depend on the outside world, and then they develop concepts that go along with that dependence, such as existence, theories about the nature of that existence, etc.

Either way, reason by itself has not shown that Forms exist, because your argument is premised on causal concepts and not simply on logical principles. So you yourself rely on causal principles derived from experience in the formation of your argument (time, active, etc), then turn around and say that it was all logic. Aristotle himself represents one of the greatest warning flags about why you need reason informed through experience in order to reach the correct conclusions about the state of the world.

Finally, there is absolutely no such thing as metaphysical reason separate from the physical structure of the brain. Let's not equivocate: it is the brain that reaches conclusions about the world. Thank you modern neuroscience.

In the end I'm afraid you are the one who's wrong. But thanks for playing.

Undercover:

I actually have read part of Aristotle's physics. I have it in my library. So which part of Aristotle's physics and cosmology are we throwing out and keeping in? The part where objects fall at a rate in proportion to their weight? The part where the heavenly bodies are perfect spheres? The part where things are made of four elements? The part where everything orbits around the Earth in perfect circular motions?

So throw out these, but keep his understanding of time right?

When you say physics provides no means to look at time as something which is measured, you are basically implying that an absolute reference frame of time exists that ticks at the same rate for everything in the Universe. No modern physics does not have that understanding, because that conception of time is absolutely false. It can be and has been demonstrated to be false in numerous experiments, another thing Aristotle didn't much believe in! Modern physics does allow us to measure time, but it warns us that our measurements do not represent an absolute state of time, merely a relative one. It also warns us that time by itself does not make any sense separately from space, hence why we describe events and causes as unfolding in spacetime. On this basis, I challenged the notion that Forms can somehow be active in time without being active in space as well. In other words, what does it mean for them to be active, if not in spacetime? But of course to acknowledge that makes the Forms physical. Your argument remains unsound and will always remain unsound as long as you cling to a false understanding of causality.

So, this was all a bunch of nonsense that means virtually nothing and did not substantially address any of the points raised against your original argument. Cool.

Wayfarer, your attempted refutation of the epistemological problem was a bunch of rambling hogwash about how neurobiology cannot explain mathematical intuition. I very much did address it in my next reply to your post. Your explanation completely avoids the actual problem: how do universals cause mathematical intuition? There are basically two answers. Say that they have no causal influence whatsoever. In that case, we don't need them at all. Or provide a causal explanation of how they interact with the physical mind, without somehow making universals physical as well. This latter effort was attempted by someone else on this thread and failed spectacularly, because it relied on vague and false notions of causality. The correct interpretation of that argument was that universals should also be physical. So the problem still stands, and nothing you have written about your magical realms comes close to a solution. I can understand why you are getting angry and frustrated with this debate: you are trying to defend a fundamentally defective worldview that needs a complete overhaul. And as you gradually realize this, you are caught in an almost existential panic, instead of doing the appropriate thing: rejecting the idiotic falsehood of dualism and accepting the fundamental truth of naturalism.

Please read again. I did not deprecate "theories from the time of Plato." I deprecated "theories of time" that came from Plato and others back then, because those ideas have been thoroughly shown to be false. Your red herrings are getting tiresome, and it's obvious you are getting so upset that you cannot even quote me correctly anymore. For the record, I have strong affinities to the ideas of many thinkers from ancient times, such as: Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, and Aristarchus of Samos, to name just a few. Notice who is absent from that list: people who said profoundly and systematically false things about the state of reality and people whose ideas became theological propaganda for desperate Christians looking to justify their fairy tales.

You will call nonsense on any attempt to answer a fundamental question unless a ready solution is handed to you on a plate. This is the attitude that separates your penchant for fairy tales with people who actually want to know how the world works.

Physics can be both in a state of flux and can still be making huge progress. You are focused on the controversies over string theory because they generate headlines. But you are blind to the enormous progress that has been made in condensed matter physics and other fields, which are influencing the answers to the very fundamental questions you are asking. Also, bear in mind that progress is not limited to science. Philosophy has made tremendous strides in the last three centuries with its broad rejections of idealism, dualism, and theism. These rejections by themselves do not mean that naturalism is right, but they make naturalism a powerful contender by default for the most powerful and accurate philosophical project that aims to describe the state of the world. I provided evidence earlier that naturalism is a very popular viewpoint among professional philosophers. So it's not just scientists who believe in naturalism. I understand it grates on your flawed understanding of reality to have naturalism be the canonical theory of philosophy, but deal with it and stop wasting my time.

I wasn't suggesting that science only works that way. Sometimes you're right it does take theory to illuminate the path of experimentation. Other times it's experimentation that leads to theoretical realizations. Both are important. What I was referring to, though I did not explicitly say it, is the hope that the LHC will produce some additional discoveries, like supersymmetric particles and other things. Yes, even though all of this stuff has been theoretically predicted a long time ago, the experimental results still matter, because the precise answers they give yield clues about which theories are accurate. For example, there were several different theories in the context of the Standard Model that guessed at the mass of the Higgs. Experiment showed it was about 126 billion ev, within the range of most of the theories. Likewise the fact that the LHC has not discovered a lot of things at certain energy ranges automatically indicates that certain supersymmetry theories are wrong. Others remain in the running because their predictions have not necessarily been refuted by results from the LHC.

Wayfarer, your argument no longer has a "respectable pedigree." It's a gigantic red herring, because it addressed a version of reason that does not exist in the real world. All you have done here is quote a bunch of random people spread out over 2,000 years and hoped that it amounts to something remotely cogent. Meanwhile, I have all of modern neuroscience behind me. The fact that you can't understand why the latter means much more than the former is very much a fundamental problem with this entire debate.

Do you understand that the status of naturalism does not hinge entirely on the latest hiccups in theoretical physics? The history of physics has featured plenty of terrible ideas, from the aether to caloric, and that's just in the last few centuries. Let's not even get started on Aristotle. And physics has faced impasses before, particularly in the late 19th century. None of this undermines naturalism; it just undermines bad physics. And as I showed in my last post, whether certain theories have failed or not depends on whether you want to ignore all the major discoveries they have produced in other fields, within physics and outside of it. Beyond physics, there have been major theoretical and experimental developments in biology in the last 50 years on abiogenesis, to the point where it looks like we may reach a unified theory on the origin of life before we get to a so-called theory of everything in physics. Likewise there have been huge advances in neuroscience. From this perspective, things look much more positive for naturalism, by which I mostly mean that the explanatory power of the natural sciences is growing rapidly.

I apologize for my harsh language, Undercover. The words I used were inappropriate and should have been avoided.

But I do not apologize for the general observation they expressed. Though not impossible, it's extremely difficult to have a rational discussion with someone who borrows theories of time from Plato and who believes that empirical reality is the subservient handmaiden to logical truth. At that point the problem is no longer dualism versus naturalism. It's the fundamental assumptions we make about the nature of the world.

Take the argument about the unicorns. Why do we all agree that it's ridiculous, even though it's a logically valid syllogism? Because we all know that the properties of addition have nothing to do with the existence of unicorns. And why do we know that? Because we have a deeply embedded sense of causality that has developed through empirical experience. Logic is meant to ensure that arguments have proper structure, that they're valid. But the way we determine if they're sound is primarily by examining empirical reality. Take that away and philosophy is pretty much meaningless.

This was the basis of my criticism for your explanation of the epistemological problem. It was a completely unsound argument. Using a word like "active" does not amount to a causal relation between Forms and real things in the world, and throwing out all of modern physics is not the best way to engage in discussion about the nature of reality.

Though not the only reason, I think my foundational assumptions of the world are largely accurate because of empirical evidence, the very thing you deny has any major importance. You think you can bring Forms into existence because of logical necessity, the very I think deny has any causal relevance in the actual world. There's no way to square that circle.

In the end, I do appreciate our discussion because it got me thinking harder about my definition of what physical stuff could be. So I don't regret this experience at all.

Wayfarer, the point I was making was that it's possible to take any property of the mind (intellect, emotion, sensation), give it a ridiculous metaphysical definition, and then claim it can never be understood through the processes of the mind itself. But the only reason why the latter becomes so difficult is because of the ridiculous assumptions behind the problem. Change the unfounded assumptions and the problem becomes more tractable. I have successfully shown in this debate that the rational operations of the mind, those which grasp abstract thoughts and concepts, are very much within the realm of analysis for materialism. David Johnson explained this all too well in his paper. The intellect is not a mysterious realm; it's a solvable problem within neuroscience.

I have read Schopenhauer's quote. I disagree with his definition of materialism, hence it will not shock you to know that I also disagree with his conclusions that follow from that original sin. Nothing has done more to take a full accounting of the self and the mind than modern neuroscience.

Janus was right. This debate is getting boring. And I was also right during our first round when I said we are unlikely to come to any agreement because our fundamental assumptions of the world are very different.

The debate about modern physics is more interesting, but will end the same way, no doubt. It seems clear that you are using the term "modern physics" to mean something like physics in the last 40 years, in contrast to the usual understanding of physics ever since relativity and quantum physics burst on the scene. It should be noted that beyond the theoretical impasse you cited, physicists have actually made some major experimental breakthroughs in this century, including the discovery of the Higgs and the discovery of gravitational waves.

As far as the controversies you highlighted, you may or may not be happy to know that I fall in the skeptical camp. I do not think string theory provides an accurate description of reality. The same can be said for M-theory and some versions of quantum gravity. However, I don't think pursuing these theories has been a waste of time. For two huge reasons. First, the theoretical breakthroughs in string theory and M-theory led to fundamental advancements in pure mathematics, especially in the areas of symplectic geometry and representation theory, which have both undergone revolutions because of work that physicists did, not mathematicians. This is just the latest example of research in physics pushing the frontiers of fundamental math. Second, the discovery of the AdS/CFT correspondence by Maldacena in 1997. That paper has been cited thousands of times by now, and its influence across theoretical physics is vast. It has led to major developments in fields not even remotely connected to quantum gravity, such as condensed matter physics. Some of these developments led to the discovery and descriptions of new states of matter. So, this side of the coin often gets overlooked when talking about string theory. People are so obsessed over its ontological accuracy and lack of testable predictions that they don't bother to notice all the great things that have come from research into string theory. String theory will have a whole other life beyond string theory.

I don't know where theoretical physics will go in the future. At this point I think people are waiting for nature to reveal another big secret through an experiment. We'll see. But I do know that the future community of theoretical physicists stands on much stronger ground for whatever research program they decide to pursue, thanks in large part to the work that has been done now.

Well if they've taken refuge in the White House, then we finally found some examples that are physical, and very orange haha!

Wayfarer, the examples I provided showed that you can use unrestricted metaphysics, of the kind you seem to be enamored with, to say a lot of stupid things about the world. Interestingly you did not object to the substance of the argument, only that it did not apply to our discussion because we're talking about reason. But I think it very much applies to reason as well, in the sense that explaining the rational operations of the mind would constitute a successful explanation of reason itself, if you are willing to pull it back from the metaphysical and transcendent realms.

Metaphysical reason is never invoked to explain reason in the context of materialism. That's a red herring. You are the one invoking metaphysical reason to explain the rational operations the mind. Materialism recognizes that those operations are emergent properties of a special kind of brain (the human brain) dynamically coupled to an external world. So it absolutely does not need the made up form of reason you are pushing to explain the mental properties of the brain, the rational and the irrational ones! Curiously, you never talk about the latter. I wonder if insanity and irrationality are also hanging out there among the Forms, constantly imbuing humans with stupidity?

So then...you agree that naturalism can provide final causes? You are upset about what, that these causes lack the "layers of meaning" that you think philosophy should have?

I strongly disagree with your assertions on modern physics. I think most developments in modern physics have strongly reinforced naturalism, not undermined it. This is not just because of the predictive power of physics. It's also because modern physics has revealed nature to be so complex and dynamic, capable of doing things that people could have never fathomed before modern times. The discovery of things like black holes, topological insulators, quantum fields, and entanglement are a reminder of the great diversity of physical systems that comprise nature. And the ideas developed to describe them provide some deep unifying frameworks, which hold great explanatory power even though many of them are still under empirical and theoretical investigations.

By your own definition of "physical" you have divided reality into multiple realms. You say that the physical is "any system subject to energetic constraints". By this definition you divide reality into the physical (that which is subject to constraints), and the constraints themselves. — Metaphysician Undercover

So let me get something straight: would you be ok with this definition if constraints were non-physical? If they lived in your magical realm with the Forms and Santa Claus? In other words, is your problem with the definition itself, or with the idea that constraints could never be physical? Or both? Because what then is your alternative to defining physical things?

The definition does not imply any division at all, and in any case I rephrased it a while back to state anything that only has finite amounts of energy, in response to your initial objection. So you keep attacking a strawman.

Have you read how I have addressed the epistemological problem. The same problem was really addressed thousands of years ago by Plato. Ancient dualist metaphysics has progressed far beyond that problem. — Metaphysician Undercover

I did. You may be shocked to know that I did not find the semi-theological speculation about the will that convincing. You may also be shocked to know that I don't find a BS word like "active" to represent a causal explanation for anything. The basic problem is that your fundamental assumptions about the world are totally bonkers. So things don't look any more promising for the conclusions you have reached on top of these weak foundations.

The evidence is logical. The active Forms are implicated by logical necessity. Their existence is demonstrated by logical necessity. Your reliance on "the empirical" misleads you into thinking that all evidence is sensual. — Metaphysician Undercover

What epic lunacy.

If 2+2 = 4, then unicorns exist.
2+2 = 4.
Therefore, unicorns exist.

Apparently I can bring anything into existence through logical necessity. This is why we should be careful with how we use logic!

But this does nothing to demonstrate that the conception of time employed by modern physics is better. And please, don't turn to your "empirical evidence". When dealing with the non-physical, as space and time clearly are, it is imperative that we rely on the intellect, and logic, for our understanding, not the senses. — Metaphysician Undercover

Beautiful nonsense, some of the most beautiful nonsense I've yet seen on this forum. I think you easily win the prize. We are aware of eliminative materialism. This is eliminative metaphysicalism at play: nothing exists or matters except logical metaphysics. The way you probably live your life and your participation in this online forum is proof enough that you yourself do not believe this garbage.

Incidentally my favorite version of the 2nd law does not involve entropy at all, largely because entropy is one of the most abused and misunderstood concepts in the history of science. Marcus has provided an example of that abuse in this thread. This is the best way to think about the 2nd law: heat and energy flows can never be entirely converted into mechanical work. MetaphysicsNow hinted at this definition above.

Now it's more obvious that life does not violate the 2nd law. Most of the energy consumed by living things ends up as waste and heat (dissipation). Only a small fraction of it actually gets converted into work, like the motion of our muscles. The efficiency of muscles themselves is about 20%, roughly meaning that around 20% of the chemical energy stored in ATP molecules actually becomes the motion of the muscle. The rest is lost as heat.

The existence of life does not contradict the 2nd law, which in one of its many (many) variations states that the combined entropy of the system and the surroundings will always increase in an irreversible process. Ordered systems like life can arise as an efficient mechanism of increasing the overall entropy of the Universe. Michael Russell's theory is based on this very idea: that life is a low-entropy biochemical pathway for hydrogenating carbon dioxide, which leads to more entropy overall. Life is not unique as a system that can replicate, assemble, and grow. There is a whole field of physics called active matter physics that studies lifelike systems that are not life. There was an astounding experiment back in 2012 or so where vortices in a uniquely turbulent fluid started replicating spontaneously. Other systems have since been found with very ridiculous properties that closely approximate life.

I think physicists could state the fundamental idea of life more elegantly: life is a dissipative thermodynamic system that aims to avoid equilibrium with the rest of the world (since equilibrium represents death for us). It takes in energy from outside, uses some of it to maintain internal order, then dissipates the vast majority of the absorbed energy back to the environment. At the end of this process, the total entropy of the organism and the environment has actually increased. Of course our internal order doesn't last forever and eventually we die. Second law still stands.

Come on now Marcus, you can do better than this.

No obviously they do not contain the same problem, for the reasons that apokrisis explained and for the reasons that I mentioned: namely that we know about constraints on larger states of motion emerging from more fundamental states of motion. There could be some kind of metaphysical resolution there. The epistemological problem only exists when you divide reality into multiple realms and then pick and choose which causal rules apply in one realm but not the other.

Nor does your attempted resolution of the epistemological problem above work for dualism. First because it assumes that "Forms" exist when there is no evidence for them. But more fundamentally, because you assume that any conception of time can exist separately from space, which is a categorical no in modern physics. So your fairy tales cannot simply be "active" in time and then go on vacation. They would have to exist in spacetime, meaning they should be located somewhere. That would make them physical in a fundamental sense, even if you don't accept my definition. Naturalism remains the correct position.

You keep harping and repeating your own delusions. If that sounds like an achievement to you, then you just might be a dualist.

To Undercover:

You sound like a broken record. I have already admitted that we don't always know what does the constraining. I certainly don't think it's a matter of writing down an equation. At best that can accurately describe what is being constrained, but cannot always conclude what did the constraining. Under certain theories of quantum gravity, entangled states give rise to space and time, and hence you can see these exotic motions as constraining the possibilities of emergent motions. But then you will ask what constrains the entangled states. The honest answer is I don't know. I could invent fairy tales like you and Wayfarer, but I have too much self-respect.

I kind of like the answer that apokrisis gave in the previous page, seeing constraints through an eternal cycle of development. I don't know if this view is right or even I fully agree with it, but there is opportunity through this line of thinking for metaphysical development of what constraints mean and where they come from.

Having said all that, it is abundantly clear to me that the definition I gave for physical stuff is at least empirically reliable, even though it has outstanding metaphysical questions...as any definition for anything would!

In a normal world, the assertion that reason permeates the "rational operations of the mind" would be considered circular nonsense, equivalent to saying that "reason permeates reason." But in the fairy tale that Wayfarer has imagined in this thread, reason has been artificially detached from the rational operations of the mind. So instead of it being nonsense, it pretends to be something deep and profound.

To get a better sense of this philosophical sophistry, let's try to explain emotion. On the dualist explanation, emotion permeates the emotional states of the mind, and thus precedes all feelings. So instead of emotion being a general indicator for the various feelings that arise naturally in human beings, emotion instead becomes a transcendent realm onto itself, the foundational source and wellspring for actual human emotions in the real world. Naturalism would fail to describe anything here as well, because the use of emotional states to explain human emotion presupposes the existence of an external emotional source, which conveniently lies very much outside of natural explanation. But why stop at reason or emotion? There are a million arguments that can be made against naturalism just on this way of thinking. Take sensation. To explain any sensation, like sight or touch, requires the prior existence of sensation separate from human experience. But since all we have to work with are sensations in the realm of experience, none of these can be an explanation for sensation itself, which obviously precedes the senses.

They will argue that emotions and sensations very much require experience and cannot be thought of as a priori. But I would argue that experience can merely explain why people become sad or happy. It cannot explain the general feeling of sadness through material causation, and hence emotion too must exist on a magical Platonic realm, ready to "permeate our feelings" with meaning.

You see how easy it all is? To reach absurd conclusions when you totally detach metaphysics from empirical reality.

We already know what makes us more intelligent than other primates or hominids: 16 billion neurons in the cerebral cortex arranged in very special ways. That's the reason why we have language, abstract thoughts, and can waste time on silly philosophical debates online. We do not need to invent magical realms to help explain why humans are different. We know it's because we had a unique evolutionary history, which primed us to have certain traits and abilities but not others.

Your attempted argument against the correspondence theory fails, because it does not follow that a belief about reality is the same thing as having knowledge of reality. Your objection would also be laughable to a direct realist, who would turn this battle exclusively into a fight between philosophy vs. neuroscience. I won't go there myself, but you get my point. Nor does the correspondence theory need to stand alone, without other epistemic support. For example, one can believe in this theory and still be a kind of structuralist, where the truth value of logical and mathematical statements is understood by relation to the wider systems in which they exist. At the same time, one can also believe that those systems approximate important features of reality, even without fully approaching an absolute description.

Suppose I have the general belief that the mind exists independently from external reality. In other words, the existence of the mind and all of its operations do not require the existence of an external reality. One way to test this hypothesis is to permanently cut off our oxygen supply and see what happens to the conscious mind. Having seen the consequences, we have then moved on from belief to something more closely resembling knowledge. Our belief in this case acted as a kind of prediction about what could happen to the mind. The falsification of the prediction necessarily requires some kind of adjustment to the original belief. Thus our predictions can be updated in the face of empirical evidence. If they hold up well, we would say they correspond. Against correspondence theories, we have essentially a bunch of competitors where truth amounts to various versions of relativism.

Nothing written about the epistemological problem actually addressed the problem itself. You spend a few paragraphs whining and complaining about how neurobiology cannot explain mathematical reasoning. Of course that's false, because I just demonstrated in my last post how gradual acts of inference across different fields led to the development of foundational logic. You will then interpret this as a kind of rational miracle, the human mind discovering timeless truths after hundreds of thousands of years in the dark. You can indulge and decorate these fairy tales all you wish, but you did not explain how your magical realms inform our mathematical intuition. You just assume the existence of "innate ideas" and "intuition," but you yourself have no idea how they actually work or why they are required, without the usual fantasies that roam your mind.

Apart from the fact that our causal theories have moved on from Aristotle and we are no longer stuck in a philosophical time warp like certain people here, you yourself acknowledged that naturalism could allow for "final causes" when you mention the passing of genes. More broadly, here is a candidate final cause or physical objective for all life, not just humans: to avoid thermodynamic equilibrium with the rest of the natural environment by continuously dissipating away energy to that environment. The real issue for you isn't final or material or efficient causes. Those are just words that you use to fill space. It's that you don't like the specific causes being invoked to explain the world, because they do not require the prior existence of your magical realm.

The last paragraph is just false. The vast majority of physicists are naturalists, in the ontological sense of the word. Dualism is not taken seriously in any of the hard sciences, because it's inherently contradictory.

I suppose we can live with "a bit" of magic.

There are structuralists who believe in some kind of modified Platonism (you actually sound like one), but other intellectual varieties also exist. In general, structuralism does maintain that mathematical statements or objects can have objective truth values, and hence are definitely not arbitrary, when analyzed in relation to their larger structures and systems.

Cool but that automatically deflates the canonical versions of Platonism, including the fairy tale varieties on offer from Wayfarer, where universal reason just magically "permeates" (his accepted terminology) the mind first, and then conjencture and criticism come later.

This is precisely why philosophers of math abandoned Platonic realism in droves after Benacerraf.

To M Undercover:

I mentioned the epistemological problem in an earlier post in this thread. It is an argument against Platonic realism by Paul Benacerraf. Here it is in the SEP. The problem is famous in the philosophy of mathematics, and it pretty much single-handedly led to the turn away from Platonic realism and towards structuralism at the end of the 20th century. It boils down to a simple question, which can be asked in different ways: how can universals communicate their properties to the human mind if not through physical causation? And if they do so through the latter, how are they not physical? It's a variation of the same question Princess Elisabeth asked Descartes: how can an immaterial soul guide a material brain? It's a problem that comes up in different guises across several philosophical fields, including theism as well, as Quentin Smith comprehensively demonstrated in his attacks against the ontological and cosmological arguments. There is no successful refutation of this problem by dualists.

You seem to be obsessed with the ontological nature of constraints. But I have already acknowledged that I don't really know where they come from or "what they are like." To echo Newton, I feign no hypothesis. Maybe God set them there. Maybe they are eternal and fundamental conditions of reality. Perhaps the most basic ones did not come from anywhere; they are just the default states of reality. I am perfectly content not knowing their "ultimate nature," to the extent that a concept like this makes any sense. To me what matters most, although it's not the only thing that matters, is that these constraints are validated through rigorous empirical observations.

Obviously I do not actually believe that mathematical equations have any causal powers. It's not like the uncertainty principle in the form of an equation is doing any kind of constraining. I believe that equations can describe important empirical relations. I believe that the uncertainty principle describes something fundamental about how states of motion evolve (ie. in certain ways and not others). But as to what ultimately explains it, I don't know. I just know that it's true.

Good point about motion. Now I never really said what I meant by motion, which is probably why you don't know what I meant! I suppose I wanted the "chain of explanation" to end somewhere, fully aware that any end will leave open certain questions, but also comfortable with that incomplete state of affairs as long as the idea has broad power, generality, and does not lead to absurd implications. Like I said I don't think there will be a perfect solution to this.

On to your very good question: how can motion not be a part of spacetime? Intuitively the very suggestion is ridiculous, I understand. We think of motion as being in space and time. And normally I would have no problem with this, but in the event that some of the quantum people are right, we have to think about motion in other ways too. We have to think about entangled states of motion that give rise to spacetime itself. These states of motion are also "constrained," which I know is not our favorite word right now. My way of thinking about things was meant to cover this scenario too, regardless of whether it's actually true. But on balance I am hoping that motion is such an intuitive thing, whether it's a car going down the street or a quantum field fluctuating, that it can cover many cases without inviting too much speculation about its "ultimate nature."

Like you I share the skepticism of saying that physical things are those things covered by the laws of physics. The measurement problem is the "classic" issue with this type of thinking. Is the wavefunction real or is it a useful mathematical construct in the Schrodinger equation? The SE itself cannot tell us what the answer is, but the implication of tom's view is that it is physical by virtue of being in the equation. So it trivially assumes as physical something that is very much controversial and contested in physics, where the Copenhagen interpretation is slowly dying out in favor of alternatives. But you don't need to be hung up on wavefunctions to see other flaws. For example are vectors physical? Some laws of classical mechanics (Newtonian mechanics) use them, but others prefer a scalar formalism, as in Lagrangian mechanics. There are a million other problems as well, some of which you and others have pointed out.

All great points. I identified some of these problems myself when I asked where do constraints come from and mentioned how in many cases we don't know. In some cases, certain constraints can be explained in terms of other constraints. For example, a limited version of the conservation of energy can be derived from Newton's third law. More general versions in classical physics can be derived through Noether's theorem, which relates continuous symmetries to conservation laws. But I admit that the idea needs more work and would be happy if you offered some suggestions to improve it.

In a general sense, I guess what I'm trying to do is put motion front and center, and then explain that things in the world can't just exist in any state of motion they like. The very concept is a bit tough for me to put into words. When I talk about actual constraints in physics, I can easily express them as equations or something to that effect. But I would want to avoid saying something like physical things are subject to equations that constrain energy, for the reasons you highlighted.

I could make things very metaphysically lean by saying something like this: physical things are just finite states of motion (ie. basically finite energy). And then when asked to explain what this means in the context of physics, I could delve into equations of constraint and things like that. Thoughts?

And I would like everyone to remember the obvious (something often lost in philosophical debate): we are in a thread called the "non-physical." There's no way to even begin making sense of that unless we make some sort of sense of what's physical. And if the ultimate answer is "there's no way in hell to make sense of either one," then we are in a pretty terrible situation where hardly anything meaningful can be said about pretty much everything that is currently under discussion. It would all be a bunch of random people on the Internet talking past each other. It should be our group project to first come up with a good definition of physical. Doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be good enough.

Let me address Wayfarer first and then I will get to some of the others. There's a lot going on in this thread right now and it's not easy to cover everything.

There is no such thing as the 'principle of objectivity' in naturalism. This is another one of your fantasies that you've created to attack a strawman version of naturalism. You mention that, under naturalism, knowledge of the external world only arises from the "analysis" of what is objectively real, but you do not say what you mean by "analysis," which is a key concept that decides whether this argument succeeds or fails. If I open my eyes and see, I have gained visual knowledge and information about the world, but I did not need any rational analysis to do so. To the extent that the external world is knowable to the brain, it's only because the latter is dynamically coupled to that world. The brain continuously interacts with the world through the exchange of energy and the processing of sensory data. It is through this dynamical interaction that brain activity comes to better understand and approximate the properties of material reality, both by learning and inventing new symbols, ideas, "abstractions," which reside in the brain itself, and by developing a perceptual and predictive apparatus.

I asked you to provide a concrete definition of reason and you didn't, but it's no longer necessary at this point. It's clear you think reason is the mystical power that gives the mind its amazing abilities, and as such cannot possibly be understood within the realm of science. You have artificially constructed reason in a way that it can never be explained. I understand your futile argument perfectly well. The intellectual methods of science being used to explain reason rely on that very reason in order to do the explanation, so they can't ever really explain reason. What actually deflates your bubble is that I fundamentally disagree with this nonsense. Your conception of reason bears no relation to reality. In reality, reason is a feature of human thought, and it arises in dramatically different ways under different conditions.

When using ground-consequent relations, it may emerge as a series of steps and calculations in neural memory that combine to reach a particular conclusion. As David Johnson pointed out in the article, these steps are themselves the products of subconscious mental states that operate in the background, only for the conscious mind to later come along and say, "look how smart I was all along." When it's Magnus Carlsen making a chess move, the conclusion may come to him instantly in an easy position, without the use of any intermediary steps or logical relations. In chess this phenomenon is known as chunking, a way the brain organizes information about a similar class of positions. After you've played thousands of games, the brain has learned both to instantly recognize certain positions and how to respond to them. When asked to recall the answer to an easy trivia question, the brain can almost instantly search its memory bank and yield the answer. This is how reason works in reality. Most of the time brain activity does not even bother going through ground-consequent relations. Of course you will say these are just specific inferences, not acts of reason. But only because you have an unfounded conception of what reason represents. And we haven't even gotten to the times when humans are irrational, when they totally flout logical relations and careful thinking. You know, like the way you're doing in this debate, eminently proving how reason is lacking in some more than others.

Here you go again with the postulates of mathematics. We live in a world where mathematical claims cannot all be reduced to pure logic, which is why mathematicians often fight about what fundamental axioms can be used and which ones should be tossed aside. I'm sorry, does that sound like objective validation impinging on the heavenly perfection of pure math? The horror! You may be further horrified to know that mathematicians throughout history have relied on objective inference to decide which axioms and assumptions are logically fundamental. The axiom of infinity had to be included in axiomatic set theory because they needed a way to justify the infinities of calculus and previously existing branches of mathematics. But wait there's more: the very introduction of infinity into calculus came as a result of trying to accurately solve and model problems in classical mechanics. Now that's objective inference leading the development of logic and reason!

Saying reason is required for naturalism to "get out of bed" is tantamount to saying, "our mental faculties need to function well in order for us to investigate the world." But what determines whether they function well is precisely their interaction with the world. Yeah, lots of things are being lost sight of in this debate.

Stating that information, in the context of your examples, resides in the memory systems of the brain is just stating an objective fact. So in every case you can imagine, the way we know what you "mean" is through our brain recalling a shared system of communication. Thus information is both physical stuff in the brain and physical stuff in the way we represent it on each and every medium.

Philosophy is concerned about many different profound concepts. Truth, meaning, value, knowledge, and existence, to name a few. Do you understand that at least some of these can overlap with science? Or are you repeating with philosophy what you have already done with reason: defining it in a ridiculous way that fits your preconceptions of the world?

By the way, I am still waiting for the dualists to address the epistemological problem. The silence is deafening.

That's an interpretation of GR among some physicists. Lawrence Krauss frequently mentions it. Sean Carroll has mentioned variations of the same idea. It may be right. Even if you believe that claim, it still provides a constraint: zero. That limits the amount of matter and radiation that can be generated in the Universe, because it must always cancel out the negative potential energy associated with gravity. So energy is still constrained even in this scenario. You cannot have more positive energy in matter and radiation than negative potential energy in gravitation, assuming the zero-energy hypothesis is true. Seems like about one of the most powerful constraints one can imagine, if not the most powerful.

Physics does not make any sense unless energy is subject to constraints. This is more of an issue for the philosophers to debate. As in, what are constraints? Where do they come from? And so on.

Sustainable methods of animal husbandry might be possible in principle and in practice on a limited basis, but they are not going to happen under capitalism on large scales. The profit margins wouldn't be the same. With this reality in mind, veganism is the best remaining choice, as far as ecological sustainability goes. But I have already acknowledged that Pseudonym and others who do make an effort to be environmentally friendly, even while eating meat, can be part of a constructive solution.

I get that this doesn't address the ethical argument, and I have little interest in debating that here. Just wanted to drop the Science article because it was new and so ambitious.

I agree that correlation is not causation, and that having neural correlates alone is not enough to solve the problem. But I also remain convinced that the more knowledge we gain about the physical processes of the brain, the more we get closer to actually solving it. Reaching the second leap you talked about is possible, if not under emergence, then under some new framework altogether.

That must be it then. I'm sure only your immaculate mind can grasp what it means.

Just so my position isn't bastardized by people who have a hard time reading: I do not think the hard problem has been solved, and I do not think we are close. I think the time horizon for a satisfactory solution is something like two or three centuries.

But just because the hard problem has not been solved does not mean we have not made progress in understanding conscious experience, as I suggested above.

The way we gain knowledge about emergence, in our context, is by learning how small groups of neurons form certain networks in response to interactions with the rest of the body and the world. And then we learn how these small networks form progressively larger networks. And the process continues until we can reliably detect and demonstrate how the global properties of conscious experience emerge from these mesoscopic (and higher) degrees of freedom. At that point we may still not have solved the hard problem, but we will have made historic progress in our understanding of the mind.

Philosophical problems also have a way of changing, being redefined, or dying out. Two centuries from now, most people in these fields may not even think there is a hard problem to solve. The best analogy, which Seth made himself, is about how people centuries ago thought that life required an 'animating' force that moved our muscles around. No one believes that anymore because now we know about proton pumps and electrochemical gradients and ATP and all that jazz.

A problem with the view that the physical is whatever has spatiotemporal location is that physicists increasingly believe time and space are themselves emergent properties of quantum entanglement. So my definition covers those systems too (ie. the things that give rise to space and time).

I have no problem saying that brain states and conscious states have different physical properties. That's the central message of modern condensed matter theory: reality has different physical orders, phases, etc. But if they are energetically constrained, they are physical by definition.

You only think there has been no progress because you assume the whole puzzle will come fully formed, without any intervening steps. But the way we get from A, which is total ignorance about the brain, to Z, which is comprehensive knowledge about how conscious states emerge from brain states interacting with the rest of the body and the world, is by filling in those very steps.

Steve:

Today we know that conscious experience cannot exist separately from brain activity. That is a realization of fundamental importance. What we don't know is what brain states produce or affect what conscious states and vice versa.

Wayfarer:

Let's be clear about the subject of the debate. The subject of the debate is whether the argument from reason is sound and logically valid. The argument states that naturalism is self-refuting because it pretends to be a rational belief about the world but then suggests that everything comes down to irrational causes, including the formation of beliefs themselves. Thus naturalism implies that belief in naturalism is irrational. This is the short version, obviously, but it's good to remember what we are actually discussing, and not what you think we are discussing. So the conclusion at stake is: naturalism is a self-defeating belief. Everything outside of that is all premises, and that's where the real debate lies.

If you follow your own argument closely, you will find that it's a total mess. You tell us that reason has to be what we use to determine objectivity. Reason is prior to any objective process. So then: how do we know that reason is prior to objectivity? Did you not use an objective process to determine that reason is prior to objectivity? If you didn't, then how is your conclusion objective? This seems to imply that reason is totally different from objectivity. In other words, naturalism is not a reasonable belief, but it can still be an objective one! Maybe you should concretely define these terms if you want this argument to actually make sense. That includes terms like "capacity for abstraction." You have basically thrown out a million different phrases in this post that all just amount to, "the capabilities of the brain." This point matters because you seem to be making the same mistake as Lewis, using a kind of theoretical (read: BS) definition of reason that does not apply to how human beings actually think.

Interesting tidbit to remember here: even if you fully accept the argument from reason, it does not mean that naturalism is false. It just means that it's not a rational belief. But it could still be true for other reasons. Plenty of irrational and unjustified beliefs can be true, and often are.

How can the information be the same while the material representation differs?

By not mixing up terms and equivocating. The information is stored as neural memory in the brain. The information is not the same thing as its material representation. The reason why we know you are talking about a bridge when you write "bridge" or a cake when you show us a picture of a cake is because prior experiences have primed our brains to make certain associations between symbols and physical objects. Take your recipe for a chocolate cake. Write it on a piece of paper using a language we both know. Write it on a stone tablet using symbols we know. Write it on a ship using sketch figures we both know. In all cases, the way I know you are talking about a chocolate cake is because presumably we got together beforehand and discussed what these symbols mean, and how or where they will be written. That information is then stored in our neural memories and every time you send me a chocolate recipe in a different medium I immediately know what you mean...because the sight of the recipe activates the relevant parts of my memory. Suppose you're the only one involved in this scenario, and you write down the recipe in three different codes, each on a different medium. Nothing fundamentally changes. Now the information only exists in your particular brain, but it's still physical.

This extends to logic and math as well. On a structuralist account, logical and mathematical objects make sense in relation to their larger structures. What are the structures and where do they exist? Ontologically, they are organized memory states in the brain. So when a mathematician needs to use ZFC set theory for something, he or she can recall the axioms just like that, because they are deeply embedded in the brain (presumably really well after years of neural networks related to math forming and growing). "But Uber, if logic exists in the brain, how can it be universally true?" Again, depends on your theory of truth! Under the correspondence theory, logical statements are said to capture something intrinsic about material reality, and that's what makes them true. But it does not follow that logical statements exist everywhere like causal danglers, with no one to think of them, make sense of them, or write them down. Is this psychologism? No because I am arguing that mathematical and logical objects do have objective value in relation to their wider systems. And these relations are useful because they can correspond to physical interactions in material reality. Indeed, the relations themselves emerged out of our examination of and interaction with material reality.

One can provide a sensible definition of physical things without worrying about the wavefunction and the measurement problem. Here is one candidate: a physical thing is any system subject to energetic constraints. These constraints could be conservation interactions for macroscopic systems, uncertainty principles for quantum systems (which covers any and all scenarios, regardless of whether the wavefunction actually exists or whether it's a mathematical construct), or any other constraint on how much energy a system can have or share with other systems. What is energy? They teach the kids that it's the ability to do mechanical work, but that ignores all other kinds of energy (heat, radiation, etc). The simplest and yet most universal definition of energy is this: different states of motion. This is the fundamental feature of all that exists. Over 90% of the mass-energy of a proton is fluctuating quantum fields; the rest is in the gluons, also furiously moving around. Thus a physical thing is anything that has constrained states of motion. Particles? Check? Fields? Check. Consciousness? Absolutely check. Try starving yourself and see how much rational thinking you can pull off.

Questions you might have:

1) Where do the constraints come from?

In the quantum case we don't always know, but it doesn't affect the reliability of my definition. All we need to be sure of is that these constraints are empirically valid, and the uncertainty principle most certainly is! Thank you 1000 experiments in quantum physics.

2) What is doing the moving?

If energy is motion, then we should want to know what's doing the moving. But having this knowledge also doesn't affect the definition. Let's say it's a car. Is the motion of the car somehow constrained? Absolutely yes. Let's say it's the sequence of thoughts inside your brain as you're reading this. Is the motion of the neurons in your brain constrained? Absolutely yes. The emergent consious states in your brain? Absolutely yes. If you seriously believe your ability to think has no constraints whatsoever, then see above. Or try to compute 3473.262427 x 2728292.9263 instantly without a calculator. Or try to think of fifty different and fully formed sentences in two seconds (fully formed and different, not vague notions or the same thing repeated!).

Thus I've done what few people in this forum seemed to have any interest in doing: provide a general definition of physical stuff that at the same time demarcates naturalism from supernaturalism. Clearly God should not be energetically constrained! And the soul can apparently survive for eternity after death. So, very much a reasonable dividing line between the two realms.

Science and philosophy have more overlap than you believe. I reject the subtle implication that philosophy only cares about the human condition. That narrows philosophy too much. As a matter of practice, philosophers also study the wider state of the world and try to make sense of it.

Your admission that science is rational contradicts your line of reasoning above. For how can science be rational when it tries to search for irrational causes? That would imply that all scientific beliefs are irrational. Suppose I tried to understand a disease in natural terms or tried to explain a weird sound in natural terms. My belief that the sound has a natural cause should be irrational, because it was produced by irrational causes. Same for the disease. On this silly argument, all of science is irrational, not just ontological naturalism.

I never claimed that the hard problem was solved. In fact I have been very explicit that it has not been solved. But only deliberate ignorance can be the reasom for claiming that we are no less closer to understanding consciousness than we were 100 years ago.