• A potential solution to the hard problem
    1. There is a real consciousness humans have, like all animals, at least, albeit in varying "complexities." It is organic attunement to organic feelings drives movements sensations presently and with no movement in time, possibly not space, as in monistic ("aware-ing"). But Ive said too much because we cannot know aware-ing; aware-ing is "pre" knowing. Our only access to aware-ing is being the aware-ing. — ENOAH
    Except for the reference to non-human animals, this is very Aristotelian. He characterizes the mind/intellect (nous) as nothing until it thinks something. He would say that we have the potential to know and objects have the potential to be known, but neither is actually anything until knowing occurs.

    It seems to me that we cannot and do not know that non-human animals are subjects of awareness in the way we are. They are certainly conscious in the sense of being responsive, but that is not the same thing.

    2. The aware-ing can organically attune, when feelings of pleasure arise, aware-ing pleasure; pain, aware-ing pain. Apple comes into view, aware-ing apple. Not "I" subject of the sentence see apple object. Aware-ing x-ing is one present event; no duality because Mind hasn't constructed difference yet. — ENOAH
    Again, this is a very classical position. First, the subject knowing the object is identically the object being known by the subject. They are one in the moment. Second, we can't distinguish aspects of oneness until we are first aware of the whole. Maritain writes of "distinguishing to unite." He means that we are aware of a whole, then divide it up mentally, (say, into subject and object), and then put it back together: "I see the apple." Making distinctions and judgements is the end of a process that begins with a whole. We don't start with the parts and then build wholes.

    3. Once mind emerged (through (to oversimplify) the evolution of Language) aware-ing x-ing was displaced by "I" am looking at an apple, or I am enjoying this Icecream. — ENOAH
    That is what I was trying to describe.

    5. So now "aware" of an object acting on my senses just means that the natural aware-ing, where there is no hard problem, is displaced by mediating processes of constuctions and projects. Such that there is the "illusion" of a hard problem; the illusion that we are "aware" of an "object" when really we have constructed it then projected it as object. — ENOAH
    The "hard problem" is not a real problem. It is like the difficulty of cutting apart concepts using scissors. If you think that all dividing is done using knives and scissors, it is a very hard to know how we can divide the ideas of red and green. The problem is not in the dividing, but in demanding that it be done using unsuitable methods.

    Nice chatting.
  • A potential solution to the hard problem
    ↪ENOAH
    Your intuitions in the first part of your response seem to align with mine. I also describe knowledge as a "projection" of reality. It is a projection in two senses. One is that it is a dimensionally diminished map of reality -- like the architectural projection of the front of a house there is more that it does not show, than that it does show. The other sense is that it is a projection of power, for it is us being aware of the object acting within us. The Hard Problem arises because an object acting on our senses does not mean that we are aware of it. We know this because much sensation is unconscious until we choose to attend to it.

    So we have a sensory projection that we can adapt and/or respond, but in addition, in some cases there is more than that. There is awareness, thought and judgement with its possibility of falsehood. At the level of sensation we do not judge, we respond. Errors are ineffective responses, not falsehoods. At the intellectual level, we judge, affirming or deny this of that. The result (our new intellectual representation) either reflects reality adequately for our purpose or not. That implies that we have purposes, not just needs.
  • A potential solution to the hard problem
    Thus the con­nection between mind and meaning, on the one hand, and subjectivity and consciousness, on the other, was completely severed.
    This is far from the position I am taking. My position involves no such division. It does involve a close adherence to the principle of parsimony -- specifically that we not posit phenomena for which we have no evidence. I am not and never have been a behaviorist, nor do I question the importance of consciousness and subjectivity to the operation of human minds. I do object to the reanimation of the analogous introspection of non-human minds without an empirical warrant, with my specific point being that since we can explain all of our observations of non-human cognition using the data processing paradigm, there is no warrant to posit either subjectivity or consciousness in that domain.

    Cognitivism, far from closing this gap, perpetuated it in a materialist form by opening a new gap between subpersonal, computational cognition and subjective mental phenomena.
    Neither is this my position. If you read my paper on the Hard Problem, you will see that it closes this gap. My work in progress is near completion and makes a significant step toward explaining this integration by showing how neurally encoded information can become intentionally active = active in the intentional theater of operations. That does not explain why there is an intentional theater of operation (why consciousness and subjectivity exist), but does show how physical activity can be linked to intentional operations.

    Enactivism asserts that via sensory-motor coupling with an environment, an organism enacts a world. — Joshs
    This is a most peculiar claim. It seems to imply that there is no per-existing environment that informs the organism and might kill it if it went unsensed. It reminds me of a claim I heard earlier this year that one one died of COVID.

    Subjective consciousness arises out of this normatively driven activity. — Joshs
    And so, in a single sentence the Hard Problem is solved!

    Here is the logic of this, assuming that you mean consciousness evolves "out of this normatively driven activity." Evolution works because some variations are inheritable and increase the reproductive success of the the variant organism. To apply that paradigm, one must show:
    (1) That consciousness has physical effects -- for if it did not, it could not increase reproductive success.
    (2) That consciousness has a physical basis -- for if it did not, it could not be encoded in DNA to be inherited.
    In other words, you must provide a physicalist solution to the Hard Problem.

    However, as I showed in my paper, this is is logically impossible. The reason is simple. Physical science begins with a fundamental abstraction. Although all knowledge involves a knowing subject and a known object, the physical sciences focus on physical objects and prescind from the knowing subject and her experiences. They therefore lack the concepts and data required to connect their findings to the intentional theater of operations and its elements (e.g. subjective consciousness).

    So, you cannot do what is required to show that consciousness can evolve without bringing in the data on knowing subjects as subjects the physical sciences have abstracted away.

    The first idea is that living be­ings are autonomous agents that actively generate and maintain them­selves, and thereby also enact or bring forth their own cognitive do­mains.
    At last, a point we agree upon. We each have our own projection of the world, and different species may have non-overlapping projections. We do not have the magnetic sense of some birds or the echo sense of bats.

    The second idea is that the nervous system is an autonomous dynamic system: It actively generates and maintains its own coherent and meaningful patterns of activity, according to its operation as a cir­cular and reentrant network of interacting neurons.
    This distorts the interactive nature of cognition, and indeed, of life itself. We have only marginal control over what we sense. Sensibles act on senses, not vice versa. Sentient beings spend significant resources reacting to their environments. So, biological neural nets, while they may have re-entrant features are not circular systems. Rather, in sensing, environmental objects modify our neural net, and that modification is our neural representation of those objects.

    The nervous system does not process information in the computationalist sense, but creates meaning.
    So, there is no biological data processing? How, then, does visual edge extraction work? Why are AI neural nets able to simulate biological behavior?

    How do you define "meaning"? Without a definition that allows "meaning" to be created by a physical operation, this is mere hand waving, a faith claim -- what Evan Thompson would like to be the case, not anything that has been shown. To create "meaning" as an intentional state requires an intentional operation and none is indicated.

    Sensorimotor coupling between organism and environment modulates, but does not determine, the formation of en­dogenous, dynamic patterns of neural activity, which in turn inform sensorimotor coupling.
    This is vitalism pure and simple. Physics is completely deterministic except for quantum observations, which Thompson is not invoking. So, something in addition physical operations is required for patterns of activity not be predetermined. In humans, we observe subjective awareness, which physics prescinds from. In non-humans the only way to subjectivity is via the deprecated practice of analogous introspection.

    The fifth idea is that experience is not an epiphenomenal side issue, but central to any understanding of the mind, and needs to be investigated in a careful phenomenological manner
    I agree with this Aristotelian position.
  • A potential solution to the hard problem
    If there is some fundamental aspect to reality then wouldn't it follow that there is an aspect of reality that does not need a reason for happening. I mean, what does fundamental mean if not that there is some aspect that "just is". If not, then there would be an infinite regress of reasons, or reality is an infinite causal chain with no beginning and no end, or another possibility could be a loop of causality. — Harry Hindu

    Of course there are no infinite regresses of causes. Believing that there are is like believing that your Xbox will work when you plug it into an infinite series of substations with no power station at the end -- because there does not need to be an end!

    It does not follow that the end of the line of explanation can be unexplained. If we allow that exception, then "Whatever is needs an explanation" has an exception and is false. If it is false in one case, why should it not be false in others? A basic principle of science will fail if things can "just happen."

    Instead, we should hold to our logic and examine what is going on more closely. What we see in the series before its end term is that every element is explained by another; however, our principle does not demand that. It demands that there be an explanation, not that the explanation be something else. So, it is possible that a term can be self-explaining and if it is, then, it would be the end of the line, because no other is required to explain it. Indeed, that is the only way we can have an end of the line.

    Not just anything can be self-explaining. Things have explanatory or causal power in light of what they are. So, whatever ends the line must have a nature that requires no outside explanation. It cannot be contingent, but must, by its very nature, be necessary.
  • A potential solution to the hard problem
    he Munchausen trilemma is proof enough that there is some truth which has no explanation. Some truth(s) which form the basis for all other truths. — flannel jesus

    Of course, not everything can be proven, Aristotle showed that 2500 years ago. Some truths are fundamental. That does not mean that they cannot be justified. The Münchhausen trilemma, as presented in the Wikipedia, makes a faulty assumption, viz. that the third alternative is "The dogmatic argument, which rests on accepted precepts which are merely asserted rather than defended." Not all defenses are deductive. We may come to truth in non-deductive ways. We may, for example, abstract from one case principles that do not depend on the details of the case, but necessarily apply to all similar cases.

    Consider Aristotle's example of a builder building a house being identically a house being built by a builder. It allows one to see that every happening is a doing, and vice versa. (The identity of action and passion). Here, experience is used, not as an unproved premise, but as a basis for reflection.
  • A potential solution to the hard problem
    And how does something physical generate these experiences? You rightly asked. It doesn't generate anything real at all. These are "codes" hijacking feelings to create this illusion of meaning and that meaning matters. It doesn't. Matter matters. — ENOAH

    It seems to me that you do not mean by "reality" what most of us mean by it. Most of us mean by "reality" the kind of thing that we encounter in experience. When you say that reality does not generate real experience, you cannot possibly be using reality in this sense.

    One test of whether something is real, is whether it can do something. Our experiences do many things. They inform us, modify our responses, etc. So, they pass the test.
  • A potential solution to the hard problem
    ↪flannel jesus
    As a theoretical physicist, I learned that whatever happens, happens for a reason, In physics, it is because there are laws of nature that make our observations turn out as they do. Over time physics has improved our descriptions of these laws -- call our descriptions "laws of physics". We do not try to explain the laws of nature, because that is not our remit, but that does not exempt them from also needing a reason for happening. Philosophy has the remit to provide that reason. So, what exempts your fundamental from the need for further explanation?
  • A potential solution to the hard problem
    My intuition tells me that there's one really important boundary - the boundary between the fundamental, and everything else. The fundamental is causally closed, but all other layers can be argued to interact to each other and also to still be sensitive to fundamental-level events. — flannel jesus
    What do you mean by "the fundamental" and why would it not interact when it acts? The only candidate I can think of is God, but there are no events in God.
  • A potential solution to the hard problem
    ↪bert1
    Thank you.
  • A potential solution to the hard problem
    Can you give an example of consciousness causing something in a way that doesn't tread on the toes of any physics? — bert1
    Why would you expect this? Since unobserved physical processes are deterministic, any physical effect consciousness produces has to be something that is not determined by physics -- that treads on its toes. Why is that a bad thing? Physics is an abstraction. It is based on attending to physical phenomena while prescinding from the inseparable subjective phenomena. So, physics necessarily produces an incomplete picture of reality.
  • A potential solution to the hard problem
    I just came across this thread. Nicholas Humphrey's article is interesting, but he makes assumptions that, on the one hand, harken back to the bad old days of analogous introspection, and on the other hand, confuse the mind with one subsystem, the brain. (See my "The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction")

    Sensation, let’s be clear, has a different function from perception. Both are forms of mental representation: ideas generated by the brain. But they represent – they are about – very different kinds of things. Perception – which is still partly intact in blindsight – is about ‘what’s happening out there in the external world’: the apple is red; the rock is hard; the bird is singing. By contrast, sensation is more personal, it’s about ‘what’s happening to me and how I as a subject evaluate it’: the pain is in my toe and horrible; the sweet taste is on my tongue and sickly; the red light is before my eyes and stirs me up. — Nicholas Humphrey

    We have no reason to believe that non-human life does more than process data. So, the application of the sensation-perception distinction to non-human life is gratuitous. AI shows representations generating appropriate responses can be fully explained with no appeal to subjectivity, qualia, or concepts properly so-called (signs that do not need to have their physical structure recognized in order to signify).

    In perception, the world is not just "doing its own thing." We only sense it because it is acting on us. So, in perception, "what is happening in the world" and "what is happening to me" are inseparably bound. What is happening is the world is acting on me. Of course, we can distinguish the cause (the world is acting) from the effect (modifing my neural state) mentally, but they are, in fact, inseparable. The world modifying my neural state is identically my neural state being modified by the world. Evaluating is a second movement, and one that occurs much less often.

    What the observations of the blindsighted monkey (Helen) show is that is that visual data processed by the optic tectum is not connected to the same response subsystems as data processed by the visual cortex. The observations of blindsighted humans show that the production of visual qualia is not essential to the production of visual knowledge.

    Since to know x is to be conscious of x, consciousness does not depend on qualia in an essential way. Qualia are merely the contingent forms of some kinds of perception. Of course, if you were normally sighted, being deprived of normal visual qualia will make you unsure that you are really seeing what you are in fact seeing using the optic tectum. Still, the information is in the mind and can be used, so with experience one can know that she knows -- to be conscious of the data lacking qualia.

    Let me emphasise: sensations are ideas. They are the way our brains represent what’s happening at our sense organs and how we feel about it. Their properties are to be explained, therefore, not literally as the properties of brain-states, but rather as the properties of mind-states dreamed up by the brain. — Nicholas Humphrey

    Clearly, sensations, what is happening to me, are not the same as ideas. My leg has been in one position to long. Without thinking, I move it. I have too much CO2 in my blood. Without thinking, I yawn. In both cases there is an evaluation, but it is automatic, and no idea is generated. Similarly, innumerable brain processes proceed without consciousness. So, consciousness and ideas are not an automatic side-effect of neural processing. Something more than neural processing is required and, as I showed in my paper, what that is cannot be deduced using physical science.

    Saying they are "dreamed up by the brain" is vacuous. What is the mechanism of this dreaming and how does it produce the requisite properties? How do physical or mathematical operations produce intentional effects, when physics and mathematics do not even describe intentionality?

    I believe the upshot – in the line of animals that led to humans and others that experience things as we do – has been the creation of a very special kind of attractor, which the subject reads as a sensation with the unaccountable feel of phenomenal qualia. — Humphrey
    Here is the transition from the description of an organism acting in a purely physical way, to a "subject" which can enter into subject-object relations -- in other words, a conscious being. Up to this point increasingly complex forms of data processing have been described, but without subjectivity. Now, as a deus ex machina, we have subjectivity. We are entitled to an account of how an organism evolves into a subject, but none is given. Yet, to be conscious is to be a subject able to enter into the subject-object relation of knowing.
  • Aristotle's Metaphysics
    ↪tim wood
    Not everyone is a learner. To learn, one must be willing to learn.
  • Aristotle's Metaphysics
    Per se causes bring out the effect through themselves. Per accidens causes are merely conjoined with the per se cause. So the the wisdom of Aristotle does not directly cause him to be hungry. It can only be an accidental cause of his hunger insofar as it for example makes him use his brain more. — Johnnie
    Thank you for your comments.

    I did not discuss this distinction, which I agree with. I discussed the difference between simultaneous and time-sequenced efficient causality, which are called "essential" and "accidental" causes in the Scholastic tradition.

    "All causes, both proper and accidental, may be spoken of either as potential or as actual; e.g. the cause of a house being built is either a house-builder or a house-builder building." (Physics III, 3, 195b4f).
    ...
    "The difference is this much, that causes which are actually at work and particular exist and cease to exist simultaneously with their effect, e.g. this healing person with this being-healed person and that
    housebuilding [20] man with that being-built house; but this is not always true of potential causes—the house and the housebuilder do not pass away simultaneously." (Physics III, 3, 195b16-21)

    First of all, it's a title of a chapter in Physics VII: "It is necessary that whatever is moved, be moved by another." Another is not identical. Unless you say that Aristotle says that beside the immediate mover there is yer another cause of an effect which is identical with the effect. — Johnnie
    Please ignore claims that I am identifying causes and effects. I am not. What is identical is the action of A actualizing the potential of B and the passion of B's potential being actualized by A. Clearly, a builder building is not a house being built. Still, they are inseparable because there is no builder building without something being built, and vice versa .

    Are you to suggest that the prime mover is identical to every movement? — Johnnie
    No, but as the ultimate source of actualization here and now, the Prime Mover is inseparable from (not identical with) potential being actualized here and now.

    The definition you quoted concerns Scotus, not all scholastics definitely. Aquinas and Suarez wouldn't agree. And they're taken to be the orthodox Aristotellians, Scotus' doctrines are controversially Aristotellian. — Johnnie
    Some of Aquinas's proofs for the existence of God (in the Summa Contra Gentiles and in the Summa Theologiae) assume and require essential causality to work.

    It is now generally acknowledged that St. Thomas is as much Neoplatonist as Aristotelian. The commentary tradition he received distorted Aristotle in an attempt to reconcile him with Plato.

    I have read one book on Scotus and claim no expertise. I quoted the article on Scotus because that is what I could find with Google, but I believe I first learned the distinction from a Thomist author I can't recall in an article about Aristotle's proof of a prime mover.

    (consider a transformation of an element, an efficient cause ceases to be once the effect is in actuality). — Johnnie
    I am not sure what you are trying to illustrate.
  • Aristotle's Metaphysics
    I found this summary of Ways of Knowing — Gnomon
    It comes from Plato. In the Republic (509d–511e) he lays out the taxonomy of thought using the analogy of a divided line. The line is first divided into δόξα (opinion), reflecting the sensible world, and ἐπιστήμη (knowledge), reflecting the intelligible world. Each half is subdivided on the basis of clarity. Opinion is sub-divided into εἰκασία (conjecture/illusion), reflecting shadows and reflected images, and πίστις (belief/science), reflecting mutable bodies. Knowledge is partitioned into discursive thought (διάνοια) and understanding (νόησις). Discursive thought uses “images” (sensible reality, e.g. as in geometry) while understanding does not (510b).
  • Aristotle's Metaphysics
    "All causes, both proper and accidental, may be spoken of either as potential or as actual; e.g. the cause of a house being built is either a house-builder or a house-builder building." (Physics III, 3, 195b4f).

    "The difference is this much, that causes which are actually at work and particular exist and cease to exist simultaneously with their effect, e.g. this healing person with this being-healed person and that
    housebuilding [20] man with that being-built house; but this is not always true of potential causes—the house and the housebuilder do not pass away simultaneously." (Physics III, 3, 195b16-21)

    Well then, why don't you accept what I've been telling you, that "being built" is a predication which implies the thing being built, "the house" as its subject. And, the house exists only as a goal or intention (final cause) at this time of being built. The house is not an existing thing affected by the activity of being built, it is created intentionally by being built.. — Metaphysician Undercover
    Because "house" can be and often is analogically predicated of a house under construction.

    Again, the point is that we are discussing efficient, not final, causality and digressing into final causality only leads to confusion.
  • Aristotle's Metaphysics
    I ran across these references just now.

    Posterior Analytics II, 12, 95a14-35 discusses simultaneous and time ordered causality.

    Cf. “In an essentially ordered series of causes, both the existence and causal function of the effect are caused and preserved by the simultaneous coexistence of the cause.” Juan Carlos Flores, “Accidental and essential causality in John Duns Scotus’ treatise ‘On the first principle,’” Recherches de Théologie et de Philosophie Médiévale 67, no. 1 (2000): 97f.
  • Aristotle's Metaphysics
    You, Dfpolis, are unable, or simply unwilling to engage with teleology, the foundational aspect of Aristotle's ontology. — Metaphysician Undercover
    Again, you spout nonsense. See my "Evolution: Mind or Randomness?" Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 22 (1-2):32-66 (2010)
  • Aristotle's Metaphysics
    Aristotle’s concept of prime matter (hylē) refers to the underlying substratum that has no form or qualities of its own but can receive various forms. — Wayfarer
    You might be interested in my "A New Reading of Aristotle's Hyle" Modern Schoolman 68 (3):225-244 (1991)
  • Aristotle's Metaphysics
    Aristotle ruled out "prime matter" as an incoherent concept with his cosmological argument. — Metaphysician Undercover
    Clearly, you know much less about Aristotle than you would like to believe. Further, you are not open to learning. So, once again, I leave you to your own beliefs.
  • Aristotle's Metaphysics
    Some thomists nowadays portray essential causality as necessarily simultanoues but this is clearly not the case. — Johnnie
    How can an agent actualize a potential without the potential being simultaneously actualized?

    Perhaps there are cases in which "essential causality" is being used equivocally, but that does not mean that, defined as an agent actualizing a potential, it can other than simultaneous with the effect of actualizing that potential.
  • Aristotle's Metaphysics
    The effect of the builder building is a house, and the house is posterior in time to the builder building. The effect of the builder building is not a house being built, as these are one and the same thing. The effect is the house. — Metaphysician Undercover
    The completed house is a cumulative effect. The immediate effect is progress toward completion = the house being built. If there were no immediate effect, the house would never come to be.

    You are stipulating a separation between the "builder building" and the "house being built" — Metaphysician Undercover
    I never made such a stipulation and I deny any such separation. They are not physically separate, but logically distinct. The builder cannot build unless something is being built, and nothing can be built unless there is an agent building it.

    Your argument amounts to employing two distinct descriptive styles to describe the very same activity, and then claim that one description is of the cause, and the other is of the effect, when both descriptions are really descriptions of the very same thing. — Metaphysician Undercover
    Yes, there is one event which can be described as a action or a passion. The two descriptions describe one and the same process (= the identity of action and passion). What is different is that the builder (not the house) builds and so is the cause of building, and the house (not the builder) is being built and so is the effect of building.

    I am not claiming that either description is the cause or the effect. Both describe a process. In that process, one element (the boulder building) is source of actualization of the materials' potential to be a house and so the cause, and the other element (the house being built) is the result of the actualization, and so the effect.

    Do you agree, that when each part comes into existence, it does so as an effect, from the prior activity of the builder which is a cause of it, and the activity of the builder is always prior in time to the existence of the part? — Metaphysician Undercover
    Yes, but that is thinking in terms of the other kind of efficient causality (accidental causality = time sequence by rule). Its effect (the existence of new part of the house) is the result of a building process. Essential causality looks at the process, not the end result, and sees that that process (building) involves two concurrent aspects (the builder building as cause, and the house being build as effect).

    Right, but "being done" implies finished, complete, the end. — Metaphysician Undercover
    "Being done" means finished, but that is not what I said. "Being done to" means an on-going activity.

    this object is supposed to be the house. But the house does not exist — Metaphysician Undercover
    I have already addressed this. When my houses were being built, my wife and I went to see our "house," and spoke of it. No one was confused by the term, because they knew it could refer to a house under construction. Please do not quibble about this again. It is unbecoming.

    That's unabashed bullshit. — Metaphysician Undercover
    I have spent enough time explaining this to you. As with our previous discussions, you either cannot, or refuse to, see what is clear to most.
  • Aristotle's Metaphysics
    Aristotle did not distinguish accidental efficient causation from essential efficient causation in the way you describe. Nor did the scholastics. — Metaphysician Undercover
    https://www.jstor.org/stable/26170042
  • Aristotle's Metaphysics
    As I explained, "the builder building", and "the house being built" are just two different ways of describing the exact same thing. — Metaphysician Undercover
    Now you are claiming that builders are houses.

    Yes, "building" is "being built". Why can't you comprehend this? The two are the very same, identical activity, described in two different ways. — Metaphysician Undercover
    Again, that is the point. Actions are identically passions from a different perspective. That does not make causes (builders building) the same as effects (houses being built).

    There is no separation of cause and effect because there is only one activity being described. — Metaphysician Undercover
    Again, exactly the point. There can be no separation, and so there is necessity. Still, the cause is not the effect, it is just inseparable from the effect.

    Further, since "the house", as subject does not yet have any existence, it cannot suffer any passion, or have any properties at all. — Metaphysician Undercover
    The house has some existence = a partial existence as a work in progress. Once building has begun, the house has a partial existence. If you do not like the term "house," substitute "house in progress." The logic works as well as it depends on the facts.

    If the cause is inseparable from the effect, then how do you know that "being built" is not the cause, and "building" is not the effect? — Metaphysician Undercover
    Because the first is the action that makes a potential house (the materials) into an actual house. Doing is causing and being done to is being effected.

    Yet you also claim that the two are concurrent and the cause is inseparable from the effect. Therefore whenever you describe the scenario, there is no way to know whether the description is of the builder building, or the house being built. — Metaphysician Undercover
    All the rest of us are able to distinguish builders building from houses being built even though they are inseparable. Distinction is mental, not physical, separation. You have already admitted the inseparability. Are you now denying the difference between builders building and houses being built?

    you've devised this elaborate way to say that it is two distinct activities, one cause and the other effect. — Metaphysician Undercover
    I have never said there are "two activities". There is one action/passion that has two inseparable aspects: a cause (the builder building) and an effect (the house being built).

    you admit that the cause cannot be distinguished from the effect, "they are inseparable". — Metaphysician Undercover
    You are confusing separation, which is dynamical, from distinction which is mental. The matter and form of a body are inseparable, but still distinct.

    So you try to hide it behind a strange use of "passion". — Metaphysician Undercover
    I am tired of your lame excuses. Both Tim and I had no problem finding the definition of "passion" I am using. Tim also pointed you to its use in Categories. We all make mistakes. It is not a character fault unless you are unwilling to admit it.

    Do you agree that to talk about causation here, we need to include "final cause"? — Metaphysician Undercover
    If we were discussing causation completely, yes. However, you asked about efficient causes and that is what I am explaining here.

    To actualize a potential here and now requires an agent operating here and now. No potential can actualize itself, because what is potential is not yet operational. So potentials are incapable of the operation of self-actualization.

    The house does not exist — Metaphysician Undercover
    "House" is being analogically predicated. It does not mean the completed house, but the work in progress, which does exist.
  • Aristotle's Metaphysics
    Df is not saying that there is a house which is being acted on — Metaphysician Undercover
    Yes, I am but I am not saying it is a completed house, but a house under construction.
  • Aristotle's Metaphysics
    This doesn't make any sense — Metaphysician Undercover
    https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/passion Def 3.

    all we have is "the act of building", and "being built". But these two are exactly the same thing. — Metaphysician Undercover
    You have left out the builder and the house. The builder building is the cause. The house being built is the effect. Of course they are concurrent. That is the whole point.

    The only necessity here is that these two expressions "building", and "being built", both refer to the exact same thing. — Metaphysician Undercover
    Ta-da! Since they refer to the identical event, the act of the builder building (cause) and the passion of the house being built (effect) are necessarily linked. But, building is not being built. so the cause is not the effect.

    If you want to separate cause from effect — Metaphysician Undercover
    You do. I don't. In essential causality they are inseparable. In accidental causality (time-sequence by rule) they are separate. That is why there are two kinds of efficient causality. The first is necessary, the second is not.

    But it's also the reason why they are not cause and effect. — Metaphysician Undercover
    The act of the builder building is not the passion of the house being built. Still, they are inseparable because they are aspects of one and the same event.

    How can I possibly assume that you know what you are talking about when you use "passion" in that way? — Metaphysician Undercover
    By referring to a good dictionary when you see a term used in a way that is new to you.

    But it is not concurrent, it is prior. — Metaphysician Undercover
    When willing to walk ends, I am no longer walking willingly. I may continue mechanically because of inertia, but that is not walking voluntarily.

    A quote requires a reference. — Metaphysician Undercover
    No, they don't. You may want a reference, but they take time, and you have not shown an openness that makes me want to devote that time.
  • Aristotle's Metaphysics
    The necessity is not bilateral because from the perspective of the builder, to build is a freely willed choice. — Metaphysician Undercover
    Again, you are missing the point. The necessity is not in the decision to build, but in the relation between the act of building as cause and the passion of being built as effect.

    From the perspective of seeing an existing building, or even a building being built, it is logically necessary that there is a builder. — Metaphysician Undercover
    The concurrent necessity between building and being built is being asserted, not a necessity in the choice to build.

    Your way of portraying the actions of the agent as concurrent with the effects of those acts, and as a bilateral necessity, completely obscures this issue, of how it is that an intentional agent can work with universal principles, a general formula, to create particular individuals of that type. — Metaphysician Undercover
    First, it is Aristotle's insight, not mine. Second, you are thinking of the wrong problem. Yes, the intentional or potential form of the effect is temporally prior to the actual effect in nature (in cases where there is change). That does not mean that the activity of producing the effect (e.g. building) is prior to the passion of the effect being produced (e.g. being built). In the case of planning, the activity of producing a plan is concurrent with the effect of the plan being produced.

    You described an instance of the act of building, and this act is caused by final causation, intention, as per Aristotle's description of the four senses of "cause". That you call this "efficient cause" only indicates that you do not understand Aristotle. — Metaphysician Undercover
    Try assuming that I know what I am talking about and see if you can make your interpretation of my words fit that assumption. When I say I am only discussing efficient causality, I mean that I am only discussing that one of the four causes. I do not mean that there are no other causes. It is only by looking for ways in which I might be wrong that these two ideas can be confused.

    If you recall, you asked a question about efficient causality and how it could be concurrent. You did not ask about free will.

    I decide to walk, and the activity of walking is the effect which follows from this cause. — Metaphysician Undercover
    Making a commitment is not an isolated event. It sets up a committed state. If I am walking and decide to stop, that commitment (the state of being committed to walking) ends, as does my walking.

    Your failure to take into consideration the role of final causation is what produces the faulty description that there is a "bilateral necessity" and that the acts of the builder, and the building being built, are concurrent. — Metaphysician Undercover
    So, you are claiming that building and being built are not concurrent? If so, we have no common basis for continuing.

    They are very clearly not concurrent because the planning of the building is an act of the builder which is prior to any building being built. — Metaphysician Undercover
    I never claimed that any and all acts of the builder are concurrent with being built, but only the act of building. Please do not extend what I say to make it wrong. I never denied that builders plan or have free will.

    That would require a reference. — Metaphysician Undercover
    No, it does not. I do not have time to deal with your negativity. You can take my word for it or Google it.
  • Aristotle's Metaphysics
    I do not agree with this interpretation. — Metaphysician Undercover
    You need to do more research.

    It is from the perspective of the effect that the efficient cause is apprehended as necessary. If the building has been built, it is necessary that there was an act of building. — Metaphysician Undercover
    The necessity is bilateral and in the present tense. There can be no builder building without a building being built and vice versa.

    Here you conflate final cause with efficient cause — Metaphysician Undercover
    Baloney. The builder is an efficient cause, and that is the only cause I discussed.

    what you call "the passion" of the builder — Metaphysician Undercover
    Read what I said. I said it is a passion of the house being built. It is not a passion in the emotional sense, but in the technical sense of suffering an action.

    The desire to build (intention, final cause) is temporally prior to the activity of building, which is the efficient cause of the house. — Metaphysician Undercover
    If I do not wish to build now, I will not build now. Planning may be prior, but the commitment to act now is concurrent with acting now.

    The action of the agent is volitional therefore there is no intrinsic necessity to that act. — Metaphysician Undercover
    I did not deny that because I did not discuss final causation, but efficient causation. The analysis also applies to cases in which the agent is not a person, e.g. acid eroding metal now is identically metal being eroded by acid now.

    Again, there can be no building a house now without a house being built now. So, unlike time-sequenced causality, an essential cause produces its effect necessarily, and the effect, which is a passion, requires a concurrent cause, because no potency can actualize itself. Bricks do not become a house without a builder.

    I do not like your characterization of this cause of activity, as "essential efficient causation". — Metaphysician Undercover
    It is just what the Scholastics called it -- a name, not something to be liked or disliked.

    This is not valid logic. Time is stated as the measure of change, it is not stated as change itself, or even derived from change. — Metaphysician Undercover
    You cannot measure what does not exist. So, if there is no change, there is no number associated with it, and time is the number we assign to change. So, there is no time. Measures are derived from what we measure.

    But the classical Christian conception of God is as a trinity, so we can still consider a separation, in principle, between plan and execution, in God. — Metaphysician Undercover
    The Trinity does not entail separation. It reflects internal relations in God as Source (Father), Self-Knowledge (Logos = Son) and Self-Acceptance (Love = the Holy Spirit). Since both God's Self-Knowledge and Self-Acceptance are complete they are identical to their Source.

    If the plan exists in memory — Metaphysician Undercover
    Since God is unchanging and timeless He has no past to remember. Everything is present to Him.

    this would mean that God is changing in accordance with His Will. — Metaphysician Undercover
    No, God willing a changing world can be and is done without a change in God. Again, God has no unactualized potential, and so cannot change.

    The end of the line of efficient causation is known under Aristotelian principles as final cause. — Metaphysician Undercover
    There is no reason God cannot be both.

    hat "change is the actualization of a potential", is your condition, produced from your interpretation, which appears to be a little bit faulty. — Metaphysician Undercover
    I quoted Aristotle's definition of change, not mine.

    That the will is free implies that it causes a type of change which is not dependent on potential. — Metaphysician Undercover
    No, it implies that it is not predetermined by potential. Potential is the ability to become other. If something cannot become other than it is, it cannot change.
  • Aristotle's Metaphysics
    That prompts the question of how Aristotle was searching for something new or not. And that is different from asking how a set of propositions, defended (and opposed) centuries later, relates to contemporary activities. — Paine

    Aristotle would use his potency and act model, and answer that philosophy makes explicit (actual) what we know implicitly (potential).

    The world acts on us, projecting its power into us, and so making itself present. When we attend to the resulting experience we know that the world can act as it does act on us, and knowing that is knowing something of the nature of the world -- for its nature is the specification of its possible acts. Thus, true knowledge is awareness of the world as it projects its power into us.

    This is why the identity of action and passion is so critical to Aristotle's philosophy. (A acting on B is identically B being acted on by A.) Here, the object informing the subject is identically the subject being informed by the object. In modern parlance, our neural state being modified by a sensed object is identically the sensed object modifying our neural state. That is why direct realism is inescapable.

    Of course, our neural state is the result of many such actions, and it requires reflection and analysis to sort them out. Still, human knowledge reflects how the world interacts with us, and not how it is abstractly. We cannot know the world without interacting with it, so it is a contradiction in terms to think of knowing objects in themselves, as not interacting with a knower.
  • Aristotle's Metaphysics
    Can you clarify this idea for me? How can you conceive of a form of causality which does not involve temporal priority? Suppose God's intention to create (God's Will) is a cause of what He creates. How can this intention to create be a cause of the creation, and yet not be temporally prior to God's creation? — Metaphysician Undercover

    Aristotle and the Scholastics distinguish two kinds of efficient causality: accidental, which is the time sequence by rule Hume and Kant discuss, and essential. Accidental causality involves two events separated in time. Because they are separated, an intervening event can prevent the cause from bringing about the effect. Hence Hume was correct in arguing that time-sequenced causality lacks necessity.

    In essential causality there is one event, and cause and effect are concurrent. Aristotle's paradigm case is a builder building a house. The cause is the builder building. The effect is the house being built. Yet, the action of the builder building the house is identically the passion of the house being built by the builder. As there is only one event, no intervention is possible, and this kind of causality (the actualization of a potential by the concurrent action of an agent) has intrinsic necessity. Since potentials are not yet operational, they cannot actualize themselves. So, something else that is already operational (actual) must work to actualize any potential. That is one of the most fundamental insights of Aristotle's metaphysics.

    Since God is unchanging, and time is the measure of change according to before and after, God is timeless. So, there is no separation of plan and execution in God. Thus, God's will for a being to exist creates the being. As would be the case when the builder stops building, if God were to stop willing the being of a creature, the effect (the existence of the creature) would cease. Thus, creation is not a launch and forget process, but an on-going activity.

    How do you get to the point of concluding that God is unchanging and timeless? — Metaphysician Undercover

    Because God is the end of the line of concurrent explanation (essential causality). Since He is the end of the line there is nothing prior to actualize any potential He may have. So, God can have no potential. That means that God is pure act = fully actualized being. Change is the actualization of a potential insofar as it is still in potency. Since God has no unactualized potential, He cannot change. Since he cannot change, there is no before and after in God => God is timeless.

    What I am asking is how are you relating "intention" to "unchanging" and "timeless"? — Metaphysician Undercover

    I am using Brentano's analysis of intentionality as characterized by aboutness. We do not just know or will, we know or will something, which is what the acts are about. Creation is about what it produces, so it is an intentional act. Intentional acts need not involve intrinsic change. My continuing to know a theorem or love a person does not require a change in my state.

    And to say that something which is "pure act" is unchanging and timeless, would be contradictory. — Metaphysician Undercover

    No, knowing and willing (both acts) all being at all times requires no change.
  • Aristotle's Metaphysics
    We have to be careful, though. The use of the word "decay" isn't being used in the traditional sense of say a uranium atom decaying and releasing an alpha particle or something of the sort. — 013zen

    Elementary particles can do the same. Neutrons decay with about a 13 minute half-life into a proton, electron, and electron anti-neutrino. (This implies a change in quarks as well.) Neutral pions can decay into 2 gamma rays, destroying the quarks constituting it. Running the reaction backwards implies that 2 gamma rays can combine to produce a neutral pion with its associated quarks.

    Still, it does not matter, philosophically. What matters is the combination of potentiality and actuality that impermanence implies. Things are not only what they are (form), but a determinate tendency to become what they will be (hyle). (They can't become just anything). That is the meaning of hylomorphism.
  • Aristotle's Metaphysics
    But, you're right given the historical evidence. We know that Aristotle was wrong, and an idea more akin to Democratus' was more right...there is serious concern regarding the method Aristotle employs to reach "metaphysical knowledge". He uses reason to try and challenge other ideas, and furnish his own account, and it lead us in the wrong direction for generations until folks like Descartes, Bacon, Newton began challenging Aristotle's ideas and considering the atomic mechanical principle of his predecessors. — 013zen

    This misunderstands both Aristotle and the history of science. Aristotle was wrong in part. So were Newton and Einstein. Atomism (the belief in permanent, indivisible fundamental particles) is dead as a door nail. Bacon did not invent the scientific method (Robert Grosseteste did).

    What specific error did Aristotle's method cause in his metaphysics? What is wrong with reason (aka logic)? Aristotle almost always applies it to observations. I am not saying that his metaphysics is flawless, just that it is well-founded and profound -- and cannot be dismissed by hand waving.

    There are a couple of articles showing that Aristotle was the father of mathematical physics and knew more about motion in viscous fluids than Newton. His much criticized relation between force and velocity is taught in every freshman physics course as the power law (P=fv). In comparison, Descartes's physics is laughable.

    This is not to deny advances have been made, but to say that more respect should be given to those on whose shoulders we stand.
  • Aristotle's Metaphysics
    But, truthfully, I think a modern notion of forms is defensible. The forms are simply the arrangement of quarks, leptons, and bosons that make up protons and neutrons, or the form that a carbon atom takes, etc — 013zen
    In the Aristotelian tradition, forms are neither Platonic Ideas nor physical arrangements, but the actuality of what was potential (hyle -- poorly translated "matter"). Since "elementary particles" are not immutable, but can interact and decay to form other particles, they themselves are a combination of form (actuality = what they are now) and hyle (potentiality = what they can become). Their potential aspect is imperfectly described by the laws of physics (e.g. quantum electrodynamics and chromodynamics). See my article, "A New Reading of Aristotle's Hyle"
  • Aristotle's Metaphysics
    There are many meanings of "form" in Aristotle and Aquinas, related by an analogy of attribution. As Aquinas explains:
    Now names are thus used in two ways: either according as many things are proportionate to one, thus for example "healthy" predicated of medicine and urine in relation and in proportion to health of a body, of which the former is the sign and the latter the cause: or according as one thing is proportionate to another, thus "healthy" is said of medicine and animal, since medicine is the cause of health in the animal body. And in this way some things are said of God and creatures analogically, and not in a purely equivocal nor in a purely univocal sense. (ST I, 13, 5)
    In other words, we may call things "forms" not because they are the same as the form of a body, but because they either cause that form, or are caused by that form.

    Forms can be "prior" in two ways:
    • God's intention to create whatever he creates, which is in the order of primary (metaphysical) causality, and not temporally prior because God is unchanging and so timeless.
    • Immanently, it the laws of nature and the initial conditions that will evolve into the informed object. This is in the order of secondary (physical) causality, and is temporally prior.

    In addition, there are "posterior" forms, which are the (1) (incomplete) neural representations and (2) the consequent concepts that result from the action of informed bodied on our nervous system and our awareness of these representations respectively.
  • Dualism and Interactionism
    The separation of electromagnetism into distinct electric and magnetic fields is something I've never really been able to understand. — Metaphysician Undercover
    That is fine. They are the components of a tensor of rank 2 in special relativity. That means that they can transform into each when we change reference frames.

    No matter what I tell you, you disagree. I don't have time to tell you why you are wrong. You asked for something you could understand, and I gave it to you. But, instead of researching it, you want to argue about it. I do not.
  • Dualism and Interactionism
    Ok, thanks for the references Dfpolis. You know my principal interest, as I've developed it in this thread, the concept of mass in physics. Can you direct me toward anything specifically related to the ideas I've expressed here. — Metaphysician Undercover
    Probably the easiest thing to grasp is the concept of fields' energy density. Since mass and energy are interchangeable, fields increase the mass of systems. Imagine positively and negatively charged parallel plates. Because they are attracted to each other, pulling them apart takes energy. That energy is stored in the electric field between the plates -- in space. When the plates are released, that energy becomes kinetic energy. The same is true of magnetic fields.
  • Dualism and Interactionism
    You claim you have been trying to teach me, but you really don't seem to be making much effort. I know that I am of the very skeptical sort, and as such I am a very difficult and trying student, but you often don't seem to be trying very hard yourself. — Metaphysician Undercover
    It took 10 years of college and post graduate education to lay the foundation for my understanding, and many years of reflection after that to integrate the pieces into a consistent whole. I do not have that kind of time to spend here. You can look at my (dfpolis) youtube physics videos if you wish. There I have corrected a number of common misunderstandings. You might also look up my paper "Does God Gamble with Creation?"
  • Dualism and Interactionism
    ↪Metaphysician Undercover
    Since you refuse to study what you insist on discussing, and will not allow me to teach you, there is no point in continuing.
  • Dualism and Interactionism
    I believe it is simply not the case that wave mechanics can explain the massive nucleus of an atom — Metaphysician Undercover
    Then you need to study nuclear physics and the behavior of the quarks in high energy physics.

    And "mass" is what is most properly related to "matter". — Metaphysician Undercover
    It was not before the advent of Newtonian physics and has not been since the advent of modern quantum physics. Mass is proportional to the frequency of a quantum in its rest frame. This applies to all known quanta and is consistent with special relativity.

    The fact that wave mechanics cannot explain the existence of mass — Metaphysician Undercover
    No physical theory has explained the existence of mass. We can explain our observations of the quantity of mass, but existence is a metaphysical problem. It was solved by Aquinas, who concluded that it is contingent on the continuing creative act of God.

    I am well aware of the strong force. It is described using wave mechanics. Its range is related to the time an intermediating boson can exist (which is inversely proportional to its mass). That time is calculated using Heisenberg's indeterminacy relation. The same is true of all the forces known to physics.

    The particle is understood to behave under the principles of Newtonian mechanics. — Metaphysician Undercover
    Which has been falsified. Why would anyone want to do that?

    If we rob the electron of its mass, take it away, and deny that it has any mass, then that discrepancy in total mass, and violation to conservation laws needs to be accounted for. — Metaphysician Undercover
    And, why would we want to discard this, or any other, fact? The mass of the electron is known with great precision. It is not zero.

    See, the fault here is to assign momentum to a wave. — Metaphysician Undercover
    All known waves, even ocean waves, have momentum. The momentum of sound waves moves your ear drum. It can be and has been measured in quanta.

    I think that this is incorrect. — Metaphysician Undercover
    Then, you need to study differential equations.

    I strongly believe that wave structures cannot account for the mass of a body, — Metaphysician Undercover
    You may believe what you wish. I constrain my beliefs by what has been observed. We can and do have energy, which is equivalent to mass, in space free of all "particles." This is known as a field's "energy density" and is proportional to the field strength (e.g. the electromagnetic field) squared.
  • Dualism and Interactionism
    So, why are we discussing "matter waves" on a philosophy forum. Does the distinction between Particles and Waves have a philosophical significance regarding Dualism & Interactionism? — Gnomon
    No. It does not. I am responding to questions about it as a courtesy.
  • Dualism and Interactionism
    But you leave the key term undefined. Is that an accurate assessment? — Gnomon
    The medium is not a key term. Physics is not philosophy. It does not aim to tell us what is, but what we can expect to observe in the physical world. Then, philosophers try to place those observations in a larger context -- one that provides a consistent framework of all human experience.
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