If I say that "I am my mind", then I am speaking as an inside observer of my mind. But this leads to the problem that the mind is discussing itself, leading to a circularity, in that the statement becomes either "I am I" or "my mind is my mind".
The statement "A is A" may be logically true, but it gives no information as to what "A" empirically is. — RussellA

I would understand "I am my mind" as saying something about your concept of personal identity, i.e. "'I' (my self) is nothing other than my mind (whatever that is)".

We can discuss the mind without ever knowing whether it exists or not
If minds don't exist, we can still discuss them as we can discuss unicorns
If minds do exist, then the mind would be discussing itself, leading to the problem of circularity, meaning that the mind would be unable to determine the truth of its own existence. — RussellA

I don't see a logical problem here.

Also, we should clarify what it might mean to deny the existence of minds. One can intelligibly argue that most traditional philosophical concepts of "mind" are defective, or that simpleminded (heh) folk concepts of "mind" are inadequate. What else?

The mind exists only as a part of language, not as part of the world — RussellA

How would your analysis differ if its object was (what is usually thought of as) a physical entity or process?

Criminal law takes the first person perspective, I experience free will, so assume you do too. — Tobias

I took a very straightforward interpretation of free will as my point of departure. There are others of course. The most sophisticated I have seen is the compatibiism of P.F. Strawson. — Tobias

That is more-or-less the ordinary language meaning of free will, and it is how P. F. Strawson, A. J. Ayer and some of the other compatibilists interpret free will as well.

Not quite sure I'm understanding the distinction you're trying to make. Can you expand? — Reformed Nihilist

Well, you yourself used the word foundation (or ground - same thing). That foundation doesn't have to take the form of an indubitable fact, like Descartes' cogito. It can be a system, a method. The important thing is that, according to this view that you question, the edifice of philosophy must have one and only one foundation.

Then again, it might also be the case that in simply having a perspective, intelligent species cannot, as it were, get out of a perspective to view nature from a "view from nowhere", as Nagel puts it, to see how things are without an interpreting mind of some kind. — Manuel

The flip side of having a perspective - shaped by one's temperament, living circumstances, life experiences, exposure to ideas - is that this perspective forms the ground of our being and our knowledge, whether or not we are aware of it and can articulate it as a philosophy. So perhaps, dither as we might, we can't help but gravitate towards some center, like a person stranded in outer space can't move away from wherever their center of mass happens to be.

Is this a fool's errand? — Reformed Nihilist

I am sympathetic to this line of thought, although I think that ground - ground of all being, or ground of all knowledge - would be a more appropriate word here than certainty. (Of course, those who plump for some such ground will disagree, like @Joshs with his phenomenology.)

It could be both, couldn't it? But to answer your question, yes, I think this is a legitimate criticism. If mind is truly apart from the corporeal world, then it is difficult to find a place for it in the world as we know it without denying or subverting the premise, or straying too far from the ordinary sense of the word.

I take this to mean the footnote, which is exactly what prompted me to comment in the first place, insofar as it appeared Carroll didn’t really know what Descartes’ definitions actually were. — Mww

What Descartes' precise beliefs about mind-body interaction were is still argued over by scholars (which suggests that said beliefs were far from precise), but Descartes doesn't own dualism (whether or not we accept the premise that he was the first dualist), and Cartesian exegesis is not a prerequisite for discussing modern-day dualist positions. Whatever Descartes said or didn't say about the issue of interaction, the issue still exists as a unique challenge for any form of dualism, and that is where attacks on dualism, including the one cited in the article, are often aimed at.

It's just the way it is. — Raymond

Ah, I see that I've mistaken a statement of personal belief for an argument or a proposal. Carry on then.

The article stipulates, “...Mind-brain dualism is the view that brain and mind are derived from entirely different kinds of things—physical stuff and mind-stuff....”, and that, “...for dualism to be true, all of science would have to be false...” — Mww

[Descartes ...]

All that says nothing of other subsequent renditions of the stated dualism, but it’s always best to start from the beginning. — Mww

Of course not. But the argument that the article cites is not confined to restating Descartes definitions. Did you read any further than that opening sentences? (I wouldn't blame you if you didn't - it's pretty blah.)

It's not so much that the mind moves physical things, rather the mind is physical things. — Daemon

That's not dualism then, but identity.

As this can only happen if we are conscious, all physical stuff, by scientific necessity, has an unchanging ingredient or charge, which, when they massively and structured combine in our brain and body, give rise to consciousness. How else can it be? — Raymond

Um... Not that? Are you seriously suggesting that the only possible way that something can emerge is through aggregation of minute quantities of its basic ingredient into a lump of a particular size and shape? So I suppose round shapes are only possible because all matter that composes them has a bit of irreducible roundness in it?

I don't disagree. I do think that what I am trying to do in this discussion is just the kind of due diligence you are talking about. — T Clark

I don't see any evidence of that in your OP, nor in most of the discussion.The thread follows the dismal pattern of all such free will discussions, where the subject is obscure and people talk past each other. (@Tobias at least has a definite idea of the sense of "free will" that he is talking about, but is this what you had in mind? I don't know, and I get a sense that you don't know either.)

I hate discussions of free will. The same old arguments over and over and over with no resolution ever. — T Clark

You know why that is? Because people who take part in these discussions fail to do the most basic philosopher's due diligence, like asking themselves what free will is, why it is that and not something else, and how it is relevant to whatever they really want to talk about, because, as in your case, what they really want to talk about is something else.

If we come to a satisfactory conclusion, it may be possible to dispense with any future such discussions. Ha. — T Clark

Nope. See above.

Is there anything to this approach, other than just advertising? — jasonm

You mean, when someone is trying to sell you something, whether a product or a point of view, they'll do whatever they can to persuade you? Well, of course they would.

However, these companies are beginning to lose many of their viewers. It appears that audiences are tiring of combative and demeaning dialogue. — jgill

I think it's just polarization. Fox viewers aren't getting tired of Fox and CNN viewers aren't getting tired of CNN. But Fox gets few CNN viewers and CNN gets few Fox viewers. It's a tradeoff between loyalty and reach.

Well, both positions, as stated, are stupid caricatures. Or the first one is a caricature; the second is just stupid.

Yanis Varoufakis, belov'd of German bankers, sparked my curiosity by claiming that idiotis, in ancient Greek, was a derogatory term for one who refuses to think in terms of the common good — Banno

Funny, I just heard another unsourced version of this factoid: as the story went, there was a law in Sparta (rather than Athens) concerning political conflicts in the polis. Every citizen was obligated to choose a side; those who didn't were called ideos. They were subject to the seizure of property and exile.

This is getting painful to watch. — jgill

This is the same crank whose banning you were lamenting earlier because (he says) he is a physicist and we should be grateful for him being here to educate us... Be wary of unhinged bullshitters confidently throwing around specialist terminology.

I'll take the bow on behalf of the late Jerry Fodor :)

By the way, I am afraid that when they talk about "Fodors’s anxieties" [over epiphenomenalism] they are misrepresenting him. Perhaps they mistook a rhetorical setup for his actual position. For example, here is the opening of the essay that concludes with that vivid wanting-reaching-itching-scratching passage ("Making Mind Matter More"):

An outbreak of epiphobia (the fear that one is turning into an epiphenomenalist) appears to have much of the philosophy of mind community in its grip. Though it is generally agreed to be compatible with physicalism that intentional states should be causally responsible for behavioral outcomes, epiphobics worry that it is not compatible with physicalism that intentional states should be causally responsible for behavioral outcomes qua intentional. So they fear that the very successes of a physicalistic (and/or a computational) psychology will entail the causal inertness of the mental. Fearing this makes them unhappy. In this chapter, I want to argue that epiphobia is a neurotic worry; if there is a problem, it is engendered not by the actual or possible successes of physicalistic psychology, but by two philosophical mistakes: (a) a wrong idea about what it is for a property to be causally responsible, and (b) a complex of wrong ideas about the relations between special science laws and the events that they subsume. — Fodor

Fodor exposes the causal exclusion argument (as it is used here) for the obvious nonsense that it is with a couple of examples, such as:

Consider, for example, the property of being a mountain; and suppose (what is surely plausible) that being a mountain isn't a physical property. (Remember, this just means that "mountain" and its synonyms aren't items in the lexicon of physics.) Now, untutored intuition might suggest that many of the effects of mountains are attributable to their being mountains. Thus, untutored intuition suggests, it is because Mount Everest is a mountain that Mount Everest has glaciers on its top; and it is because Mount Everest is a mountain that it casts such a long shadow; and it is because Mount Everest is a mountain that so many people are provoked to try to climb it... and so on. But not so, according to the present line of argument. For, surely the causal powers of Mount Everest are fully determined by its physical properties, and we've agreed that being a mountain isn't one of the physical properties of mountains. So then, Mount Everest's being a mountain doesn't affect its causal powers. So then - contrary to what one reads in geology books - the property of being a mountain is causally inert. Geoepiphobia! — Fodor

It should be noted that Fodor explicitly stipulates "property dualism" as a precondition for the line of argument that he mocks. That's why he says in this example that "being a mountain" is a non-physical property: just as mental or intentional properties are held to be non-physical because they aren't "items in the lexicon of physics," any property that is not in the lexicon of physics must be ipso facto treated as non-physical on this account.

Fodor's own solution rejects the principle of causal exclusion in favor of causal sufficiency:

P is a causally responsible property if it's a property in virtue of the instantiation of which the occurrence of one event is nomologically sufficient for the occurrence of another. — Fodor

On his "covering law" account there can be multiple causes for the same event, and the epiphenomenalist worry stemming from causal exclusion is dissolved. Thus, if we accept that there are mental, or intentional laws of some sort, then the mental is not epiphenomenal. That there are such laws is implicit in the very attitude towards the epiphenomenalist threat that Fodor satirizes: "if it isn’t literally true that my wanting is causally responsible for my reaching ... it’s the end of the world." That is, we ordinarily assume that it is true my wanting is causally responsible for my reaching. We treat this connection between wanting and reaching as a law-like regularity. You don't have to call these laws physical if you don't like, but that doesn't matter for the argument.

What motivates all those math people? Tenure/promotion considerations. Prestige within a community. Delight in the exploratory aspects of a subject with few constraints arising from the physical world - free rein for one's imagination. — jgill

Yeah, I think imagination, curiosity and play are underestimated in these reductionist accounts of mathematics, even though they are as much a feature of our psyche as anything else.

From my vantage point as a very senior citizen, the first thing I note is the huge number of people pursuing activities compared with 60 years ago. I haven't a clue as to numbers of mathematicians then and now. But at that time the outdoor sport I became involved with had perhaps a couple of thousand fairly serious devotees here in the USA. Now there are well over six million. World-wide there may be ten million or more. It staggers the mind. — jgill

Ha! You think there is a connection? :) From my own experience, I've known a few physicist and astronomer climbers, but can't recall any mathematicians off the top of my head.

In the quoted passage Brown and Ladyman give only a brief outline of a solution; do they go on to say more? From this one paragraph it's difficult to tell just where their solution is situated, but it does have some resemblance with identity theories (see for instance Mental Causation in the SEP).

They are being a bit coy though in that it is not clear how seriously they take the causal exclusion argument and whether they think that mental causation does have its place. When they switch from subvenient to supervenient, from physical to mental, they no longer talk about causation and instead use the word "description." But is it a causal description that parallels a description in terms of physical causes?

They also use the word "express," which hints at realization.

There is an article on supervenience in the SEP - probably more than you want to know, but relevant to this topic. Here is a handy definition from the opening:

A set of properties A supervenes upon another set B just in case no two things can differ with respect to A-properties without also differing with respect to their B-properties. In slogan form, “there cannot be an A-difference without a B-difference”. — Supervenience

The question seems a correspondent of the most popular question “Was mathematics invented or discovered?” and relates to the nature of mathematics as well as to the philosophical problem of applicability of mathematics. However, there are anthropocentric and evolutionary features that the philosophical investigations on this topic have not focused on much — Doru B

The idea of naturalizing mathematics is not new. It is how the thesis that mathematics and mathematical truth are discovered (as opposed to constructed or pulled from an ideal Platonic realm) is often cached out.

Though the research in "perceptual mathematics" cited in the article is recent, the general finding that there are innate proto-mathematical capacities should not come as a surprise. This doesn't resolve the question of whether mathematics is invented or discovered, but perhaps the question should be dissolved as a false dilemma. We might gravitate towards certain mathematical structures due to innate predispositions. We also invent mathematics to deal with empirical problems. We also invent mathematics with no practical goal in mind and then, having a ready-made tool at our disposal, opportunistically find a use for it. Nowadays we also invent a load of completely useless mathematics, of which perhaps a small fraction will ever find an application, and the rest will gather dust in mathematical journals and specialist books. Then again, pure mathematicians share the same cognitive apparatus with the rest of humans, they develop in largely the same environment, and their work is influenced by past mathematical culture.

So, what to make of this tangle? That it's not either-or - it's both and then some.

Here’s a copy of the paper, I responded to a post about it on Reddit

https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1391&context=comparativephilosophy — Ignoredreddituser

Well, the paper doesn't give any detail about the causal continuity theory beyond what you've summarized here, and I don't feel like delving into Buddhist philosophy to find out more. Perhaps there is a more tenable version of the model than just a hand-wavy "causal stream"? Otherwise it's hardly worth talking about.

I don't really have a stake in this argument, since I don't subscribe to the causal continuity theory of personal identity. As a metaphysical theory, I would even object to the presumption that identity has to be grounded (reduced to) something else. As a summation of its semantics (i.e. how the concept is ordinarily deployed in speech and thought) it doubt that it works well.

That said, it would be good to see a fuller exposition of the thesis before considering the criticism. Obviously, personal identity can't be all and only about causality, else it would entrain your entire past lightcone, let alone people around you.

As a possible defense though it could be argued that people and other influential events in (and even preceding) your life do contribute to the development of your personal identity and to how you and others perceive it.

This cracked me up. So you want to write a fugue...



Written (yes, written) by Glenn Gould.

it has been asserted by a number of philosophers that the predicational logic underlying mathematics is not irreducible. There may be more ‘precise’ ways to render
the world than via a mathematical language. — Joshs

Can you plain this a bit more? "Not irreducible" = reducible? To what? And has anything been proposed as an alternative to a mathematical language?

I must admit that I was kind of playing devil's advocate here. I do not honestly believe that we systematically confabulate structure where none exists. Peirce famously quipped: "Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts." Taken at face value, I think this is exactly wrong. Like many people raised in the same rationalist, scientific tradition, I do not doubt in my heart the vision of a rule-bound world. And this complacency is what worries me sometimes, so I want to push back against it.

I can think of two arguments against this possibility.

1. Consider just how implausible it would be for the development of structure in the world--any structure, never mind galaxies, solar systems, complex molecules, life, or intelligent life--without regularity. — Asphodelus

Well, structure and regularity are related notions, but yes, of course I wasn't arguing for a solipsist vision in which none of the apparent regularity is real. The world has to be regular enough to produce all these things.

2. On the fundamental level of matter, space, and time, the world has proved to be extremely regular. — Asphodelus

Yes, this is what convinces the most. It is all right to talk about alternative possibilities in the abstract, but when you actually study nature, especially at its most basic, you see just how tightly it constrains our explanations. And the more closely we look, the less room there is for error, which begs the conclusion that any apparent slack is due to our lack of understanding.

This doesn't hold equally well across all inquiries though. The larger and more complex the object of study, the poorer the data, the more we have to rely on statistics and plausible extrapolation to make the best of a bad situation. And this is where our optimistic, pattern-seeking nature can get the best of us (not to mention systemic flaws in our scientific institutions). We tend to oversimplify and overexplain in the face of messy or insufficient information.

I agree that with the above, but that does t necessarily mean the below follows from it. — Joshs

Saying the world is mathematical is like saying that it consists of propositional statements. — Joshs

I was just loosely referencing the idea of a clockwork universe, structured world, mathematics being "embedded" in the world - however you want to express it. This general idea has been widely shared by rational-minded people, but caching it out with more philosophical precision opens up a metaphysical Pandora's box, as I am sure you are well aware.

Why do people hate Vegans?

They taste like broccoli. — Banno

Nonsense! I love vegans, especially those health-conscious, exercise- and diet-obsessed ones. They taste like high-end gourmet pork.

It isn't "formulated in a priori necessity in the armchairs and heads of mathematicians".

That's a relatively recent image of mathematics, a consequence of the advent of modern academia.

Mathematics is embedded in the world. — Banno

You make like you are objecting to the OP, but here you are just restating the same thesis. Yes, the game analogy is a bit awkward, but the idea is the same: mathematics fits the world so well because the world just is "mathematical."

The game analog breaks down, because any move can be made to fit into the rules of a game in which part of the game is to re-write the rules. — Banno

Not any move, surely. The world is rich enough to exhibit multiple regularities, depending on how you look at it, and those regularities can be modeled in multiple ways. Still, when you get into the nitty-gritty of said modeling, you will quickly discover just how tightly nature constrains our efforts - ask any working scientist! For better or for worse, scientists aren't free to make any moves they wish.

Which, of course, forms the essence of the OP question. When people wonder at how well mathematics fits the world, there are two seemingly opposing aspects to this observation. On the one hand, yes, we've had a lot of success with mathematical modeling. On the other hand, you can't just make up anything and apply it anything equally successfully. It's a very tight fit, especially at the most basic (aka fundamental) level. This is what makes the fit seem to remarkable.

Still, there's this nagging doubt that I referred to earlier and that perhaps you had in mind as well: how much of that fit is down to our desires, prejudices and biases?

Split personality?

This is easy to see in a simplified situation of games, but harder to see in the situation of mathematics and the natural world. — Asphodelus

To be honest, I thought it was rather the opposite: the game analogy is overly complicated for the point it is making, which is that the world has a certain structure and we, being part of the world, are constrained by that structure. And that the world being structured is what explains the effectiveness of (some) mathematics in describing it, since mathematics is a way to build or describe abstract structures.

Of course, that's one possible explanation. Another is that we expect to find structure, are constrained by our mental constitution to find structure, and that is why we find it. This isn't as neatly self-contained as the first explanation, since it doesn't explain why we are constituted this way and how it is that we exist at all, in contrast to this:

So here's a kind of anthropological explanation for the effectiveness of mathematics to the natural sciences. Of course our cosmos yields to the great book of mathematics, because a cosmos that didn't wouldn’t have us in it. In short, only a regular universe can harbor intelligence, and a regular universe is mathematically describable. — Asphodelus

But what if there is some truth to the second possibility? What if the world is not quite as regular as our science implies, but we are biased against noticing this fact, because we have evolved to seek out and take advantage of regular structures?

Topical:
"I am here for my 5th shot because of the 3rd wave..."
"...or the other way around."

1. The total number of meaningful messages is less than the total number of possible messages. The proof of this is that the same message can be sent using different codes, such that, once transcribed into meaning by the receiver, it is the same message. For an example, we can imagine whole books of English where every letter is simply shifted one space down, A becomes B, Z becomes A, etc. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is assuming that there is a strict mapping from code to meaning (a surjection in this case). In reality, of course, the interpretation of a text ("code") is not unambiguous, which is to say that the same code can generate multiple meanings for different receivers (readers) or even for the same receiver.

My question is: isn't this just a debate about the definition of 'causality'? Does it really matter which definition we accept? Can't we simply decide the definition? — clemogo

And by 'definition of causation' I don't mean the literal dictionary definition or scientific definition. I'm referring to whether or not causation is transitive... can we just decide whether or not it is? Or is it something that needs to be discovered somehow? — clemogo

Your question is odd. Surely, if causality is more than an idle fantasy that we are making up here on the spot, then the question of whether causality is transitive is not independent of what we believe causality to be?

JTB is posited not as a dictionary definition of the word 'knowledge' but as a specialist philosophical definition. Like you though, I am not sure how useful it is for that purpose. Sometimes it seems that it has no other use than for people to argue over it, but perhaps my perception is skewed by these perennial Gettier-type debates on the internet.

It's better to let go of this constraint and simply use the word knowledge as we tend to do in ordinary life, which usually does not pose much problems in discussion, outside of specific cases like this. — Manuel

The thing is that ordinary use varies, and there is a sense of knowledge that answers the JTB criteria. The truth criterion is justified by locutions such as "I thought I knew that P, but I was wrong" (i.e. I didn't actually know that P). Or "A thinks that she knows that P, but she is mistaken."

But I agree that JTB picks out at best some, but not all ordinary senses of knowledge.

One good thing that's come out of this discussion is that I've learned, partly thanks to Banno, that espouse does not mean advocate. — jamalrob

It's the difference between living with your spouse and prostituting him/her.

Well, not quite. We want a theory that rules out things that are contradicted by the evidence. — Banno

The thing is that when you reduce a theory to very general and rough slogans, like "minimizing surprise" or "survival of the fittest," you will readily find both apparent examples and apparent counterexamples, which then prompts complaints that the theory is either contradictory or explains too much, or even both (@Kenosha Kid). The devil is in the details, as you acknowledge. Without getting into those details you can't really say anything one way or another.

I am sympathetic to your attitude towards totalizing theories. But there is a difference between a general unifying idea and a detailed treatment of a subject. Evolutionary biology as a whole is a complex and diverse field, appropriate for its complex and diverse subject. And yet Darwin's basic insight pervades it throughout. I think there is room for more such insights in cognitive science and biology.

By the way, looking Friston's publications, you can see a rather typical pattern where the further he gets from his own field, the wider he casts his net, the more diffuse and light on details and empirical support are his (team's) works, shading into pop-science and philosophy-lite. (There is also an inverse correlation with the number of citations...) Then again, if he got something essentially right, then these kinds of big-picture narratives can be valuable as setting directions for future research and providing an insight into large-scale patterns.

Again the point is made that an explanation for everything is an explanation for nothing. — Banno

This - not so much this article, but your complaint that PP/PEM seems to have an explanation for everything - reminds me of a common creationists' complaint about the theory of evolution, which often follows a series of failed challenges to its ability to explain evidence. The fact that a theory can explain all evidence doesn't distinguish between a good theory and a vacuous theory. And there is no way to establish which is the case other than scrutinizing the theory and how it purports to explain evidence. There are no easy shortcuts here to dismissive judgements.

Another thing to note is that there are different ways to respond to a challenge. One is to make a positive argument that the challenge misses its target, e.g. by conducting a decisive test, or by showing that what is alleged to be the case necessarily is not the case. Another is to argue that the challenge may not hit the target. For example, when creationists rhetorically ask "what good is half a wing?" one response is to argue that the equivalent of "half a wing" can be adaptive (maybe not for flying). This second mode of response doesn't provide an additional argument for the theory, but it does forestall the challenge and tasks the challenger (or alternatively the defender) with going deeper and doing more work. This is how we can view Friston's response to the "dark room" challenge in the comment article that you shared.

Point being, despite some protestations to the contrary, it is still not clear how this fits in with thermodynamics and information theory. — Banno

You picked a rather peripheral article, a comment. Friston's background is in fMRI and computational neuroscience, and that is the inspiration and the main source of evidence for his free energy model, not so much high-level psychology. These would be a better place to start if anyone is looking for more substance:

A free energy principle for the brain (2006)

The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory? (Nature Reviews 2010)