I have considered if the whole "getting something from nothing," issue with strong emergence isn't just a more particular form of the old Parmenidean problem of "how can you claim things change at all?"

For things to change, it means they become something they are not. But that means what we really have is a case where things that are cease to be and new things come into being. Which means you have to either deny real change (neo-eleatic positions, eternalism) or recognize that new things coming into being and existing things ceasing to be is downright fundemental.

What offends us about strong emergence then isn't the "something from nothing," but the difficulties of abstracting flux and process into some sort of static equation we can point to and say "this is the real thing! This equation describes all that apparent change, but there isn't really change, there is just this one thing." If there is strong emergence, then by definition you're not going to be able to get that.

As I mentioned in the "What is Computation?" question a while back, this certainly goes into how computation is viewed. Often its necessarily step-wise, processual nature is glossed over, with the idea that it is the eternal relations it elucidates that are fundemental, the process just an accident. But looking at the physical basis of computation would suggest exactly the opposite, that process is fundemental and such "eternal relations" are merely instantiated through them.

We know that chemical laws boil down to physical laws,

Oh contraire mon frère, this is more something we thought we knew at the high point of reductionism. The case for this is now more difficult. IMO, it would be foolish to assume reductionism as a given until it is decisively disproved, since reductionism itself was never been decisively proved in the first place. Reductionism trades off millennia old intuitions and philosophical arguments, and this might be grounds for dismissing it as much as supporting it. That is, it is arguably something that has been so popular for so long (since the pre-Socratics) only because it is intuitive, "neat and tidy." But our intuitions often seem to lead us astray, so this might be a knock on the idea as much as support for it.

Bogaard (1978), Scerri (1991, 1994) and Hendry (1998) have all questioned the possibility of fully reducing chemical theories about atoms and molecules to quantum mechanics. Bogaard argues that many key chemical concepts such as valence and bonding do not find a natural home in quantum mechanics. In a similar spirit, Scerri points out that the quantum mechanical calculations of atomic spectra standardly presented in chemistry textbooks make highly idealized assumptions about the structure of many-electron systems. These approximations are well-motivated on pragmatic grounds. However, they do not allow quantum mechanics to “approximately reduce” chemical facts, because the errors introduced by these approximations cannot be estimated (Scerri 1991, 1994). Further, one of the most important chemical trends, the length of periods in the Periodic Table, cannot be derived from quantum mechanics, unless experimentally derived chemical information is specifically introduced (Scerri 1997). Drawing on the work of Woolley (1978) and Primas (1981), Hendry (1998) argues that there are principled difficulties in accommodating molecular shape within quantum mechanics: the Born-Oppenheimer approximation effectively adds structure by hand. Although quantum chemistry can be extremely illuminating, these authors argue that it has not reduced chemistry to physics.

If one thinks that reduction means deriving the phenomenon of the higher level exclusively from the lower level, then these arguments should settle the question of reduction. More than 80 years after the discovery of quantum mechanics, chemistry has not been reduced to it. But there are two possible reductionist responses to this argument...

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chemistry/#CheRed

There are generally two big responses to save reduction. One is that we just lack the computational abilities to get to the reduction. I am sympathetic to this one. However, it is a problem that this is an argument advanced for almost all cases of apparent emergence, and has been for decades. But since the 1980s computational capabilities have exploded. How far must they advance before this idea loses currency? In theory, you could make this argument no matter how far computational abilities advance. However, we'd then have to ask, "does every last molecule require these vast computational resources to do its thing? How does that work?" This is the intuition that leads pancomputationalist physicists to be surprisingly friendly to the idea of strong emergence. There doesn't seem to be any physical "stuff" that could accommodate this amount of computation.

The second argument goes like this. Most chemists, and most scientists are physicalists. Core ideas in physicalism, particularly superveniance and causal closure, seem to make emergence quite impossible. I am less hot on this one. It seems to be having the cart drive the horse.

If the problem with explaining apparently emergent phenomena is just that you need a "lot more computational capabilities," then what you have is merely 'weak emergence,' and reduction still works. However, I don't think appeals to mind boggling complexity do anything to deal with the conceptual problem of how it is that we keep adding functions to some computation and then, at some indefinite point, our computation begins having first person subjective experiences (the plausibility problem).

Relevant to this first problem would be the argument that the information carrying capacity of all baryonic matter in the visible universe appears to be inadequate for computing even simple forms of life. If these sorts of arguments bear out, then the problem can't be resolved by more efficient computational methods.

The other problem with "weak emergence only," views (essentially the reductionist view) is their plausibility given problems related to the most basic phenomena we study. The problems with proposed instances of emergence vis-á-vis quantum mechanics itself, spacetime itself, holographic universe conceptions, molecular structure, etc. don't seem resolvable simply through greater computational power (see the quote below).

Your post seems to blend two ideas though. That our conceptual framework is fundementally lacking, and that we simply lack computational power adequate to "brute force," our way through these issues. I would just ask if these are the same position vis-á-vis emergence?

With the former view, I do think it's quite fair to ask if superveniance and thus "emergence" are even framed in the right terms, using the right categories. This is in line with process-based critiques of the entire problem, that it rests on bad assumptions baked into science that go back as far as Parmenides. The "lack of computational power," explanation seems like a different sort of explanation.



From the SEP article on emergence:

A striking feature of quantum mechanics is known as “quantum entanglement”. When two (or more) quantum particles or systems interact in certain ways and are then (even space-like) separated, their measurable features (e.g., position and momentum) will correlate in ways that cannot be accounted for in terms of “pure” quantum states of each particle or system separately. In other words, the two need to be thought of as a coupled system, having certain features which are in no sense a compositional or other resultant of individual states of the system’s components (see Silberstein & McGeever 1999 and entries on holism and nonseparability in physics and quantum entanglement and information).

Humphreys (2016) construes this as an instance of emergent fusion (section 4.2.4). Insofar as these features have physical effects, they indicate a near-ubiquitous failure of whole-part property supervenience at a very small scale. However, it should be observed that quantum entanglement does not manifest a fundamental novelty in feature or associated causal power, as it concerns only the value or magnitude of a feature/associated power had by its components. (Correlated “spin” values, e.g., are permutations on the fundamental feature of spin, rather than being akin to mass or charge as wholly distinctive features.) As such, it does not fit the criteria of many accounts of strongly emergence.

It is, however, relevant to the epistemic status of such accounts: if one thinks that the existence of strong emergence is implausible on grounds that a kind of strong local supervenience is a priori very plausible for composed systems generally, then the surprising phenomenon of quantum entanglement should lead you to be more circumspect in your assumptions regarding how complex systems are put together.

I liked Tegmark's book, but I don't think his speculation actually resolves the Fine Tuning Problem the way he thinks it does. It seems like there would be many, many more ways for a computable universe to create our perceptions, and the illusion that we live in the type of universe we think live in, then worlds that are actually like the world we think our sciences describe. This is a more general undetermination problem that is like, and includes the Boltzmann Brain problem.

And the supposition that the universe must be computable is just a supposition.

To be fair, weak emergence doesn't have the "magic" problem. Weak emergence doesn't preclude reduction, and can be explained in terms of "data compression." But weak emergence, so defined, then fails to actually address any of physicslism's plausibility problems, i.e., the idea that it seems impossible to imagine how physics explains facts like "how coffee tastes," or how you can keep adding complexity to a computation until it spontaneously begins tasting coffee.

Strong emergence fixes the plausibility problem at the cost of making the coherence problem far worse. After all, if mind is strongly emergent, and thus a fundemental, irreducible force with sui generis causal powers, how is that not what people generally mean by dualism? E.g., Wigner-Von Neumann QM where strongly emergent conciousness is what causes all collapse seems like it could be framed as dualism or even a sort of idealism, since it is irreducible mind that actualizes histories (you'd probably wed the idealist version to the retrocausal crystalizing block universe).

This gets at an adjacent problem with coherence, that quantum foundations is an absolute zoo of theories, and some do not sound very "physicalist." E.g. Mermin: "the Moon is demonstrably not there when no one is observing it."






Such a house built with the blocks is reducible to the blocks. You can compute the "possible houses," and their properties from knowledge of the blocks alone. The structure of the house would be analogous to some sort of "weak emergence." Strong emergence is irreducible, and thus "physically fundemental." If substance metaphysics, causal closure, and superveniance are your starting points, "like magic" is often how strong emergence is defined.

This has obviously been a bad analogy and I regret using it. The blocks weren't supposed to stand in for "physical stuff" but rather the starting points of substance ontology (the world is fundementally things/objects that interact), superveniance, and causal closure. The idea is that you don't get those blocks to form a sphere, etc. unless you radically alter the paradigm, the equivalent of pulling out a Sawzall and some wood glue and tearing your blocks apart.

Just to be clear, my argument here is not that there aren't plenty of good candidates for emergence or many powerful arguments for why something like emergence is necessary to adequately explain the world. There clearly are. My earlier post in this thread was all about how the empirical evidence for reductionism is actually quite weak, and how it seems possible that it is an idea that only has currency because it is "neat/tidy" and fits our intuitions.

My point is about whether or not other assumptions upstream of emergence, assumptions that have been key to defining physicalism in something approaching a rigorous manner, seem to simply preclude emergence in any sort of a strong form.

My actual position on this would be that this shows that something is probably deeply flawed with the concepts of superveniance and causal closure. With causal closure in particular, I think a lot of unwarranted assumptions get smuggled in.

As mentioned before, I think process views represent a potential resolution to these difficulties. However, I will allow that it is possible they only look promising because they have yet to be subjected to anything like the same level of analysis and critique, being less popular. In such views, there simply isn't superveniance, but the partially analogous idea of superengrafment. I think I quoted Bickhard earlier on the idea that process "allows for strong emergence," but this isn't exactly accurate. It simply doesn't need emergence. More is fundementally different.

(Note: most process philosophers would say the world is composed of fundementally "physical" processes, but this seems to me to be more a broad commitment to metaphysical realism than anything else. Such views represent a radical departure from mainstream physicalism in that physical 'stuff/thing's are not fundemental.)





It's not "explain how every incidence of emergence works," but rather "explain how any meaningful emergence can possibly exist in the context of superveniance/causal closure?" How do we get something new and irreducible, with real causal powers, and not have that new force impinge on the causal forces at work in whatever the emergent phenomena emerges from? If something is emergent, isn't it, in a very important way, "fundemental?" But if we have all sorts of sui generis fundemental forces, why has demonstrating downward causality been such a flop?

Epiphenomenalism solves this problem by having conciousness be emergent, but causally non-efficacious. There are significant problems with epiphenomenalism. For one, if epiphenomenalism is true, there is no reason for natural selection to give us perceptions that in any way represent the world accurately, and there is no reason why pain should have to "feel bad," etc. I don't think anyone moves to epiphenomenalism because it sounds like an appealing position. They end up there because of the significant problems both with causally efficacious emergence and with the plausibility of a physicalism without emergence.

They are between a rock and a hard place; dealing with the plausibility problems of physicalism and the coherence problems of meaningfully defining it.

I have considered that, if only mind is truly emergent, there is actually a fix here. If you accept the Wigner-Von Neumann interpretation of quantum mechanics, then mind, being strongly emergent and thus fundemental, absolutely has quite observable causal effects on the rest of the world. Collapse/decoherence is the emergent effect/downward causation. But this ends up looking way more like dualism than physicalism (and people have made the argument that "physicalism with strongly emergent, irreducible mind," is actually just what is generally proposed by science-oriented dualists.) There are many reasons this is unappealing. I don't buy it, but it does seem to work.

The blocks argument is supposed to be an analogy. Superveniance and causal closure essentially give you wooden cubes to work with. You then sit down to make something like a steel sphere. You're never going to get there because the materials you started with preclude your ever being successful. Either emergence has to go, at least in any strong form that would seem to resolve the issues it is supposed to resolve, or the things used to build a definition of emergence and the physical would seem to need to be rethought significantly.

As with causality, it doesn't seem to stand up to close inspection.

Sure, but the same could be true of physicalism itself, all but the most neutered definitions of truth, the concept of information, objectivity, etc., including conciousness itself.

IMO, one of the biggest missteps of modern philosophy is to decide that if a concept is hard to frame or explain it must entail that the concept is meaningless, should be eliminated, or is somehow related to a "pseudo-problem."

Truth is a prime example in that it clearly seems to assert itself, even if it is hard to define.

That said, I will grant that the problems with emergence are particularly acute, but that only makes sense when it's a concept built on top of other concepts with similar issues.



Certainly. Paul Davies' article introducing "Information and the Nature of Reality," is titled "From Immaterialism, to Materialism and Back," trading off these sorts of intuitions.

The problem is not in finding examples of phenomena that might exhibit emergence. There are plenty of those. It's in framing what emergence is in a way that meshes with the overall ontology (which would generally be physicalism since the overwhelming amount of work on emergence is in that context).

The blocks example is about our intuition — a metaphor.

Well, I slogged my way through a decent amount of:



..and it actually reduced my confidence in "emergence," being any sort of magic wand for difficulties in forming an ontology that is both plausible and strongly framed. The arguments in Kim's "Physicalism or Something Near Enough," are a doozy.

The problem is that "what constitutes emergence," is deeply tied to metaphysical considerations that lie upstream of the concept, and how dependence is framed. Emergence is an old concept, but it seems many classical formulations of it are dead in the water.

I understand why people think we need emergence. My intuition though, is that a lot of attempts to build a definition of emergence are being built on top of prior assumptions that simply preclude the possibility of such a thing.

"How do you combine a bunch of building blocks and get something completely new that wasn't in the blocks to start with?" Intuitive answer is you simply don't. Same as how you don't get an ought from an is.

I've decided that ontologies are a lot like impressionist paintings. They look better from far way. :rofl:

So, is philosophy very much invested in physics? Should it be? Is philosophy equipped, in general, to circumvent details and pull quantum tricks out of its big hat?

I don't get how it couldn't be, since "what is the ultimate nature of reality," seems to be a question both physics and philosophy try to answer. The lines between theoretical work and philosophy break down frequently across the sciences, and this is particularly true in physics.

Physics is also important because of the popularity of scientific realism and because physicalism (the dominant ontology) often tries to define itself in terms of "what physics says there is." There is, on the face of it, no reason they shouldn't closely interact. In many ways Einstein is the biggest philosopher of physics of the 20th century, as well as perhaps the biggest physicist.

We were just having a discussion as to whether causation should be removed from discussions of ontology because it "doesn't exist in physics." This was Russell's argument circa 1910 or so. "If physics doesn't use cause then it is anti-scientific and incoherent." Of course, Russell's premise is simply wrong today, physics does talk about cause, just not the "law of cause," he successfully attacks. It's actually not clear that Russell's premise was remotely true when he made his argument either.

The two intersect all the time. Credentialism here is really frustrating. Is Tim Maudlin not qualified to discuss physics? Can physicists not discuss philosophy well despite having dedicated years to studying it? I'll allow that people on both sides can opine about areas they don't understand well and make bad arguments, but this is hardly always the case. Nor is someone necessarily better informed about their own discipline.

David Mermin, the physicist who coined the phrase "shut up and calculate," for quantum mechanics also once got frustrated with realists in a paper and declared "the Moon demonstrably does not exist when no one is observing it." What could be more philosophical than that?



I find that Hume is only convincing if we take his argument against induction seriously prior to his argument against causation. If we use induction, building up evidence for causation is easy.

IMO, the debate about whether cause can be demonstrated a priori is sort of a red herring. The Principal of Sufficient Reason is its own thing and should (and now is) dealt with separately.

Hume's argument against induction is very difficult indeed. I think one of the best arguments against it is not that it fails in some crucial way, but that it turns out you can create perhaps even better arguments against deduction providing any knowledge. The position collapses into radical skepticism, which arguably just shows the problem with the foundationalist epistemology of Hume's era.

I do think Hume's denial of the self can be successfully defeated though. If every perception was actually distinct, sui generis, then you couldn't actually experience time or compare between them. Each moment would be so utterly distinct as to be experienced by a completely different entity, which Kant gets at, or Borges in his story "Fuentes and his Memory."

Yeah, they're synergistic for sure.

I had this idea of turning deduction / induction into a Hegelian negation type deal, and trying to see if there was some sort of "negating the negation," that would produce a synthesis.

I have never been successful in thinking this through. I can't even decide which would come first. Induction and pattern recognition I think, because you can't do deduction until you have terms and axioms, and those would exist in sheer sense certainty. But is the exercise really meaningful if it doesn't reveal some new, third type of analysis? And even if there is one, am I going to discover it? Unlikely.

But maybe something like:
>Induction comes first
>The negation is Hume's problem of induction, induction turns out to be hollow, which leaves us with deduction
>Deduction reveals itself to also be empty, because of the scandal of deduction (or maybe it reveals itself just to be induction ala Mill, Quine, etc.)
>synthesis, abduction -> synergistic synthesis

Pragmatism born of Hegelian dialectical. Wa la! Needs work. :rofl:

Just to be clear, I agree with you 100%, and Hume obviously had a pragmatic sense about this too. I'm just saying that if you accept his argument about induction being unjustifiable and irrational, it strips away almost everything. You have to focus on if there is a purely deductive argument because induction, all induction, can only be justified by using induction itself. It can't be deductively justified.

Only a priori deductive arguments are valid (and we can even question if those exist). You can't justify a belief in documentation of past observations or your own memories.

From the SEP article on the "Problem of Induction"

Yet many have regarded it as one of the most profound philosophical challenges imaginable since it seems to call into question the justification of one of the most fundamental ways in which we form knowledge. Bertrand Russell, for example, expressed the view that if Hume’s problem cannot be solved, “there is no intellectual difference between sanity and insanity” (Russell 1946: 699).

What's funny is that these is an inverse problem, the "Scandal of Deduction," where you can also show that deduction generates absolutely no new information. If we take these conclusions seriously (we shouldn't, but they are worth investigating and fun), then we're left with nothing. I can't believe I'm going to say it, but I agree 100% with Russell on this one, if you're wed to a foundationalist, non-pragmatic, non-fallibalist epistemology (which I am not, partly because of this).



I just thought of a good description of process philosophy from a physics article in Spring Frontier's "It From Bit or Bit From It."

The author, who I don't recall, uses Plato's cave analogy. Physicalists (and idealists) they are concerned with objects. These objects, in the case of physicalism fundemental particles, are the shadows on the walls of the cave. The reality is the field, and the field is inherently process, flux. We can, of course, abstract the conception of any process back into an object, but this is in fact a mistake because it gives us an illusion of permeance and underlying substance. Something like that.

I don't think this follows, because all the documents we have point to nature behaving in the past as it does now

What's the purely deductive argument that secures the premise "documents we possess are a reliable record of past events?"

This doesn't touch my physicalism, because I don't see everything as reducible to physics. I don't know of any physicalist, who if given the choice, would say that they believe everything reduces to physics, as against everything reduces to the physical. Now I could easily imagine a physicalist saying in a sloppy way that everything reduces to physics, but I would simply intepret that as a figure of speech that is commonly used to refer to the physical (at least in some crowds).

I think you're right. The driving rationale behind "everything reduces to (a complete form of) physics," would appear to be to avoid the charge that the claim that "everything is physical," is a vacuous statement. If the term "physical" is defined loosely, in an open ended manner, such that "if science/other valid methodologies provide good support for x's existence, then x is physical," the claim becomes the hallowed out "everything that exists is what exists." Or, "physicalism" just seems to be scientific realism with extra ontological baggage attached that is associated with the term.

Reduction wed to causal closure are good for physicalism in that they do seem to set some solid limits on what would qualify as non-physical.

So the problems with reduction are not necessarily problems for physicalism, I agree there. There could be another good way of defining what it means for something to be physical, and maybe that's what the ontology really needs and someone will find it. But reduction is a good candidate for defining "what is physical " precisely because it would seem to entail, barring panpsychism, that mind is not a fundemental, irreducible aspect of the universe. And, while definitions of "fundemental " are debated, being strongly emergent would seem to make something fundemental in key ways.

"Mind is a fundemental, irreducible element of reality that interacts with the mindless, physical world in a causally efficacious manner," seems like a summation of dualism, but would seem to be consistent with physicalism with strong emergence too. What's the difference then?

And this could lead into other problems like "are abstract objects emergent from mind," and if so, wouldn't abstract objects now also be "physical."

For my part, I see the problems with getting the term firm enough to have sufficient omph behind it as a much larger problem than general plausibility.

BTW, I think the most flexible/plausible versions of idealism begin to have an extremely similar problem.

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

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

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

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

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



Hume's argument against induction would appear to apply to past events as well though. So inductive arguments about the past get the axe too. "The Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776," or "lunar eclipses have been predictable" are the types of statements we believe because we trust the source that is telling us them or because we remember the past events. However, why should we think any source of information is reliable? It certainly can't be because they have been reliable in the past. Why should we think our memory is reliable? If you cannot demonstrate that you have a reliable memory using only deduction, it seems to me like you are SOL.

I think one of the great think Hume demonstrates is the absolute poverty of what can be demonstrated without inductive inference.

Of course, the guy doesn't argue that we should take him too seriously. The book burning thing is clearly a joke. But if he was truly right, it would seem to make science completely irrational.

Why would it trouble us if everything was reducible to the physical?

It's not that everything is reducible to some amorphous and expansive idea of "the physical" but rather that everything is reducible to physics. I see three distinct problems here.

1. One problem is the adequacy of the types of explanations that physics offers. Can physics, in something like its current form, adequately explain the experience of seeing a sunset, of tasting coffee, etc.?

It's hard to see how the qualities of first-person experience could be adequately expressed by physics. Even if it is conceivable that physics could tell us why coffee tastes the way it does, it seems perhaps impossible that it should tell us what coffee tastes like. But if there are facts about things like "what coffee tastes like to Bob," then it appears that physics cannot describe all facts about the world.

This is, IMO, the smallest problem. You could argue that this is simply asking too much from an ontology.

2. There is no reason to think reduction must necessarily be true. We might ask: "is there even good empirical evidence to support this hypothesis, or is it just popular because it is intuitive?"

Consider that even basic phenomena have not been successfully reduced despite decades of efforts. Molecular structure is an example. Chemistry is not a new field. It is on the very low end of the complexity scale, just above physics. Yet, if I recall correctly, a small majority of chemists don't believe their field can be successfully reduced (which is meaningful given the popularity of reductionism writ large). That doesn't mean chemistry can't be reduced to physics, it just means that we should consider if reduction should be the "default" assumption and considered highly plausible despite more than a century going by since the heyday of reductionism. There are also plenty of physicists who think their own field has examples of strong emergence, which adds yet another wrinkle.

One of the things that would caution against reductionism being the "default view" would be just how ancient and venerable the idea is. It's an idea that is popular because it's intuitive; it's "neat." From the birth of philosophy on, people have been speculating that all the variety in the world can be reduced to just one thing (e.g. water, fire) or just a handful of things (Empedoclean elements). It's the type of idea we naturally gravitate towards. Particularly, it's appealing when it can be framed as "little balls of stuff make up everything," as it often has been going back to antiquity. I suspect this might have to do with how our senses of sight, touch, hearing, and the vestibular sense all work to build a model of 3D space, meaning that aspect of experience is intrinsically "cross-checked" for veracity more than color, taste, etc.

This is not to ignore all the evidence of successful reduction. However, that not all things are strongly emergent is not evidence that nothing is. IMO, there is a problem in how the burden of proof sometimes get framed, as if strong emergence must be convincingly demonstrated to show that reductionism isn't true, but not vice versa.

3. The problem of showing how first-person subjective experience emerges from nature (assuming pan-psychism is not true) without strong emergence.

A related problem here would seem to be that, if reductionism and the causal closure principle is true, then mental events have no causal efficacy. If mental events have no causal efficacy, then we have to ask why natural selection should result in producing phenomenal experiences that are anything like the real world? Why should pain be unpleasant if whether or not you take your hand off a burning stove has nothing to do with the subjective experience of pain?

The problem with epiphenomenalism in particular is not quite as bad IMO. It isn't really a challenge to reductionism as much as current formations of the causal closure principle, such that mental events are causally ineffective. But that's just a subproblem within 3, although relevant to physicalism because causal closure is often used to define physicalism.

I'm not sure why that is so. Unless by process metaphysics one is arguing that only processes, not the physical constituents involved in the process are real?

Sort of, but not really. Bickhard's "Systems and Process Metaphysics" is a good intro, but I can't find it without a paywall. The idea is that "objects" what we've evolved to focus on, are actually just long-term stabilities in physical processes. Even "fundamental" particles appear to have a beginning and end.

In the end you have a simplistic counter to physicalism that only functions against reductionism specifically...

I'm sympathetic to the idea of something like "physicalism without reductionism," but as is discussed earlier in this thread, I'm not sure such a thing currently makes much sense with how physicalism is generally defined. Physicalism might have to become just a vague commitment to naturalism and metaphysical realism to deal with strong emergence (which, to be fair, I think that's how many people colloquially use the term).

I would say with high confidence that most scientists do not spend much time focused on the ontology of physicalism, problems related to supervenience, the causal closure principle, etc. Kim's argument against the possibility of strong emergence, given a substance metaphysics, seems very strong. Given that, strong emergence doesn't seem to be an option for physicalism.

To be sure, I've seen theoreticians who do end up having to consider things like Kim's work suggest a move to a process metaphysics. But this move probably requires jettisoning a lot of what makes physicalism "physicalism."

It's an example of Hemple's Dilemma, I guess.





It's definitely overly simplistic, but I didn't want to get into a long analysis. I still think the idea that we have, in some respects, an inversion of Plato in the modern period holds water though. Maybe it just shows an overall tendency to want to reduce things we don't understand to things we (think we) understand.



:up: , it's definitely very much the opposite with early empiricist tabula rasa



I agree with all that, particularly that cause alone cannot act as support for physicalism. The question of science re Hume as a whole is sort of interesting, as his attack on induction would seem to cut the legs out from underneath the entire scientific project.

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

We don't need to suppose that "science," as a whole, uses cause. One cannot get through a science degree without having heard the mantra of "correlation does not entail causation," hundreds of times. Compare that to the idea of constant conjunction.

Take Cartwright's example of TIAA, some life insurance provider for teachers. Members of TIAA tend to live longer. This is because of traits that teachers tend to have, the fact that the job is not particularly dangerous, that they are less likely to smoke, etc.

You can't tell me that there is not a scientific explanation for why filling out a form for TIAA does not cause people to live longer in the way that their quitting cigarettes will cause them to live longer on average. Or that there is no difference in the way effective medical treatments such as antibiotics cause infections to clear up, versus how snake oil works.

The problems with cause become acute precisely in those situations where one want to make absolutely global descriptions that have no external frame and engulf the description itself. This is why it was so intuitive for 19th century thinkers to make "natural laws," external Platonic entities that act on the world from outside it. But we have good reason to believe these problems might be broader conceptual issues not even specific to cause, but to self-reference. This is why they are a problem for Hume, because he's primarily thinking of the broadest aspects of natural philosophy.

As with the concept of "truth," I think people have been far to quick to say "if we can't currently formalize it and figure out problems with it, if old theories have holes, then it doesn't exist/is meaningless/a pseudo problem." If we did this with other areas of inquiry we'd have long since decided life, mind, spacetime, etc. all don't exist.

As for Hume waking us up, I've always thought Hume was too good for his own good. If I take all his arguments seriously, I have to allow that some force me to reject others, and that I actually have absolutely no good reason for thinking Hume can teach me anything about anything, or even that a person named David Hume ever existed... or that I exist... If Hume is right, then I shouldn't believe him.

I liked Nagel's book, but it occured to me that the problem goes back even further, to Plato and the Pythagoreans. Way back with the Republic, we get the idea that the knowledge of mathematics is of a higher type, the standard to which all knowledge must aspire.

Because mathematics hadn't been successfully applied to the world yet, Plato decided there was simply something wrong with the world. That wasn't a fatal problem, because we could still get to the mathematical truths through our mind.

The modern period is defined by the success of applying mathematics to the world, and over time Plato gets inverted. Now there is no problem with the world, it exemplifies perfect mathematical beauty, but with the the mind.

Plato, on some readings, ends up quasi-elimintivist on the world. It is, in a crucial way, less real. Modern thought ends up quasi eliminitivist on the mind in the same way. Even Hume's matters of fact/relations of ideals (roughly Kant's synthetic/analytic) mimics Plato.

The history is instructive in that I think Plato, and later Plotinus, Porphery, Proclus, Augustine, etc. resolve this idea with their principle of non-dualism and unity, elements of Platonism that do not appear in the inverted modern views as much.

I see what you're saying. If the universe is actually eternal, that solves the problem. But cosmologists often frame the problem as getting support for this position in the first place. Basically, if inherit fluctuations in the singularity could produce the universe 14 billion years ago, how did the singularity not produce any such fluctuations for an infinite amount of time before these fluctuations finally did occur? My understanding is that this is the problem that drives the appeal of cyclical universes or Black Hole Cosmology.

Of course, we could appeal to the status of time in singularities, but we have reason to think our understanding of singularities is incomplete because of Hawking radiation, conservation laws, the prediction that black holes will decay and have an end, etc.

Which is achieved through Absolute Knowing. But to figure out how this is achieved, students of Kabbalah and the Gnostic Ogdoad will need to first watch the reboot, Neon Genesis EvanHegellion.

I have no doubt that if you search biology journals the term "eyes" would appear far less frequently than the terms "cells" or "genes." But would this entail that biology has eliminated the concept of eyes?

I'll just throw out there that even the Neo-Russelians, people who have committed a substantial part of their careers and thus their lives to trying support the general thrust of Russell's argument, don't think the "appeal to use in the advanced sciences," premise is either true, or that if it were true that it would support Russell's conclusion.

Consider also how speculative arguments about the role of information in physics and metaphysics go back quite a long way. But through Russell's era, and a good deal after, one would have been hard pressed to find many references to "information" in physics journals. Now the term is everywhere, information theory a major component of the field. And yet information theory itself was developed in the special sciences, with Shannon drawing heavily of philosophical work that had been done earlier.

This is initially how I was conceptualizing the problem as well, but I think it runs into problems. "Time" doesn't exist outside of our 4D spacetime manifold. When our universe spontaneously exists, it is like a 4D object popping into existence, outside of any external time dimension.

If we believe in eternalism and the "block universe," the entire object (our universe) is there all at once. If we believe in the local becoming, the "growing block universe," or the retrocausal "crystalizing block universe" then it is possible to say the object "grows," although this is tricky to conceptualize because it's "growth" would not occur across any sort of external, "global" time dimension (difficulty in conceptualizing this is in fact one of the arguments for eternalism, although I don't think it's a good one).

Other things that spontaneously exist wouldn't "start to exist" within the context of the time dimension of our own universe. You need an external frame here, and here it might be useful to conceptualize our universe as only two dimensional, with a third time dimension. Sort of a cube springing into existence, which is how the block universe and it's variants are normally portrayed.

So for a visualization, the problem is sort of asking, why haven't new shapes sprung up that interact with our universe's "block." But visualization is probably misleading here, because we might want to think of one cuboid smashing into another, but again, there is no spatial dimension for various block universes to be placed in where they can or can fail to intersect.

That means the question is more abstract. Can something start to exist that will interact with our "block universe?" Maybe my solution works, because there is no reason why different sorts of objects should interact. Maybe it doesn't because the very fact that our sort of universe does exist means the sort of stuff that would interact with our "block" can, and does spring into being. Appeals to the frequency of this happening "over time" don't work because the time dimension itself is one of those things that spontaneously exists.

Smarter people than me, who actually specialize in this sort of thing still think Johnathan Edwards has a point here, which makes me skeptical of the solution, although I've never seen the point specifically addressed.

Thanks. I'm not sure I really understand the question, maybe because I'm not super familiar with Heidegger.

In general, I think pronouncements about the "end of metaphysics," have always been a bit much. We had a period in the 20th century where it was popular to embrace the death of metaphysics, itself a position that made many metaphysical assertions, but as the generation that bought into the "death of metaphysics," and the "linguistic turn," retires, it sort of seems like we are in the beginnings of a "ontological turn," where metaphysics is embraced again.

I agree. "Realist" international relations theory doesn't seem to actually explain history very well, and so relies on all sorts of ad hoc additions like "chain ganging," etc. For example, Mearshimer's "offensive realism," would predict that the United States should have annexed Canada (and Mexico) at any point since the Civil War, when it clearly became capable of doing so. It doesn't, because no one in America wants that, regardless of if it would improve national security, which it obviously would have during the early Cold War when Canada waffled on how many US assets could be placed in the arctic to defend against the Soviets.

American support of Israel is a particularly stark example of where cultural ties have outweighed strategic value. Another example would be Hungary joining the Axis due to a shared experience of WWI and resentment over how the war was concluded, rather than the actual strategic merits.




There are way more than 1.6 million Palestinians that live in Israel. The 20% figure is for Arab-Israelis, who live within Israel's 1948 borders and have full citizenship (2 million). A further 4.5 million live in the occupied territories. This is relevant in that it makes the one state solution fatal to the idea of a "Jewish state." In a one state solution, just under half the population would be non-Jews and, due to disparate birth rates (the OTs has one of the highest birth rates in the world), non-Jews would very quickly outnumber Jews.

The question is, should there be a "Jewish state?" which is much the same problem as "should there be a Kurdish state?" Should Iran be ostensibly a "Persian state?" when minorities make up half the population and want to leave? Should Afghanistan ostensibly be a Pashtun state? Should China be a "Han state," when it has hundreds of millions of people who aren't/don't want to be "Han." I don't think there is always a good answer here, as independence movements are extremely plentiful, and it's unclear if "a Flanders for the Flemish," or "one island, one Ireland," really resolve the root issues.

Anyhow, while I am sure fringe figures have advocated for expelling the 20% of Israeli citizens who are Palestinian Muslims, this is a fringe position. Removing a whole fifth of Israel's population, people integrated into the economy and with full citizenship rights, is a different question.

"How it forms" is not a cause.

Yes, that's the premise I was accepting starting out. Things can begin to exist for no reason at all, no Principle of Sufficient Reason in effect.

I'm not really sure if you're trying to rebut my solution or the problem itself? If a singularity can start to exist, i.e., it did not always exist, why can't others? Why does one beginning to exist preclude others?



Virtual particles are not, currently, "directly observable." They have effects that can be observed, which is why the idea has gained currency. This is true of other phenomena in physics, and it also has been true of phenomena we have since developed means of observing more directly. I'm not expert on virtual particles, but those writing about them seem to suggest that they are a good deal less fully speculative than say, strings. E.g., pronouncements like "Experiments to measure the Casimir Effect show that virtual particles do exist.". (To be fair, I believe some people still advocate for alternative explanations here).

But this might actually not be all that relevant because virtual particles, like quark condensate, appear in space-time, within fields, and so they are not truly forming "out of nothing." A universe with an origin point would have to have these very fields and spacetime itself pull off the same trick. The problem of "existence ex nihilo," then is different than the problem of "creation ex nihilo."

Anyhow, I've considered that a Big Crunch or a Big Bang that eternally recurs because of the properties of a universe in heat death would all solve the problem, but these work by making the universe eternal. Black Hole Cosmology works by making the universe caused. So, I guess this problem would apply to only certain cosmologies.

If we subdivide into 9 sub squares, the probability of choosing one of those sub squares is 1/9. If we have 25 sub squares, the probability of one of those is 1/25. Time to retire here, too.

If I understand the point properly, it would be that each square has a 1/9th, 1/25th, etc. chance of being filled in. And the question is, what % of the surface area is likely to be filled in by this process as we add more squares and make each square smaller.

But I don't think this is necessarily relevant since it would seem to relate to the size/mass-energy, what have you, of objects beginning to exist within an already existing space-time.

Hitchcock does not agree with you. He says Russell's premise re "cause being irrelevant because it is absent from the advanced sciences," (e.g., physics) is demonstrably false and also, not even good grounds for the idea that "cause is unscientific." Go check out where he covers Suppes after Cartwright.

Suppes 1970 writes:

The words ‘causality’ and 'cause’ are commonly and widely used by physicists in their most recent work.

There is scarcely an issue of Physical Review that does not contain at least one article using either ‘cause’ or ‘causality’ in its title. A typical sort of title is that of a recent volume edited by the distinguished physicist, E. P. Wigner, ‘Dispersion relations and their connection with causality’ (1964). Another good example is the recent
article by E. C. Zeeman (1964) ‘Causality implies the Lorentz group.’ The first point I want to establish, then, is that discussions of causality are now very much a
part contemporary physics. (Suppes 1970, pp. 5–6)

Hitchcock writes:

Since Suppes wrote this almost forty years ago, I conducted a quick and unsystematic internet search of the Physical Review journals (a series of 9) from 2000 to 2003 and found 76 articles with ‘cause’, ‘causes’, ‘causality’, or some similar term in the title. Here are the first three examples listed: "Tree Networks with Causal Structure’ (Bialas et al. 2003), Specific-Heat Anomaly Caused by Ferroelectric Nanoregions in Pb(Mg[sub
1/3]Nb<sub>)O and Pb(MgTa)O Relax-ors’ (Moriya et al. 2003) 'Observables’ in causal set cosmology’ (Brightwell et al. 2003)

So Suppes’ observation remains true in 2003.</sub>

And it's easily demonstrable today that "cause" is not absent from the "advanced sciences," if this is to be defined as physics, because it is particularly frequent in discussions of quantum foundations.

So a key premise of Russell's argument, is simply not true. And I've seen other people look back to his era and question if it was ever true, or just something he pronounced without anyone really calling him out on it. After all, that premise mattered less when he advanced his idea a century ago, since the almost 200 year old definition of "the law of causality" as framed by Mill was the key target.

The argument against Mill and Kant is mostly successful. The premises that "cause" is incoherent, and not useful because it is not used in the advanced sciences, is not.

In the bigger picture, it seems like another example of the larger problem that Russell and some of his associates had of thinking that "if I can't understand something or formalize it then it doesn't exist, is a 'pseudo-problem,' or is 'meaningless.'" But the failure of thinkers to produce a widely agreed upon, philosophically adequate explanation of a term cannot entail that it is meaningless, else we have to allow that Dennette is correct and that we cannot be concious due to the lack of a widely agreed upon explanation of the term (and we probably can't meaningfully be communicating in a thing called "language" either, since language would also be "meaningless").

Hitchcock also summarizes why Cartwright and others give us good reason to believe that problems with causation are particularly acute in the most general/universal settings (e.g. cosmology, Russell's original example of gravitation) for epistemic reasons. Whereas these issues tend to be less acute when we can remove observation from the frame of reference, which would explain why cause is much more common in some areas of physics than others, and remains very popular in the special sciences.

I'd just add that pancomputationalism is extremely popular in physics, which has built in a ready made explanation of how past states dictate prior states that could be used to understand cause, granted in a way that doesn't line up with naive views exactly. People advocating for some form of pancomputationalism would include Vedral, Lloyd, Tegmark, Deutsche, Davies, etc.

Uh, even the Neo-Russelians admit that they have a major problem with how much scientists appeal to cause: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1093/bjps/axl027?journalCode=bjps

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://prce.hu/w/teaching/HitchcockRussell.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjwyqPR48KDAxVEjYkEHbtcCgMQFnoECBoQAQ&usg=AOvVaw3v878Do8RSObSgYqoN9Rpb

And these are the supporters of Russell saying the elimitivism case is DOA (although able to be resurrected in some respects).

This seems relevant since it seems like you are saying that something like Russell's argument is the cause ( :wink: ) for the lack of cause in the sciences? Or physics anyhow. The special sciences are always going on about causation.

"Cause" isn't a term used in physics, having been replaced by maths since Galileo. But it lingers in meta-physics and in pop philosophy of science.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. I read a lot of popular physics and physics articles and cause is mentioned frequently. There is, for instance, all of Wheeler and Penrose's work on retrocausality.

If "cause" had been removed from "physics" back in Galileo's day then why was Russell's argument against cause novel and influential (for a time) in physics proper? Causal eliminitivism ala Russell is a decidedly minority opinion, while the rejection of causal relations is probably safely in the majority, making the status of cause nuanced. Which is why you still see books being published with titles like "Causation and Its Basis in Fundemental Physics."

Questions of causation, like eternalism, are properly part of metaphysics, but that doesn't stop physicists from writing about them, even in popular science books. Which is why it so easy to get the idea that "physics says eternalism is true," when in fact it's:

A. Hard to see how this could ever be empirically tested.
B. The popularity of eternalism with physicists is largely grounded in philosophical arguments, also with Russell being very prominent there, that have become part of the physics literature through osmosis. E.g., when Davies discusses why eternalism is the case, all his arguments have their origins with philosophers.

"Cause isn't in physics," would seem to me something like "physics shows eternalism to be the case," except at least in the latter case eternalism is at least widely popular, whereas eliminitivism on cause is not.

More than a century ago, Russell launched a forceful attack on causation, arguing not only that modern physics has no need for causal notions but also that our belief in causation is a relic of a pre-scientific view of the world. He thereby initiated a debate about the relations between physics and causation that remains very much alive today. While virtually everybody nowadays rejects Russell’s causal eliminativism...

And while I assume my reading could be biased, I hope specialist reviewers would keep stuff like this out of abstracts if I was that far off.

Smallism is a neat term for the idea that "facts about large things are reducible to facts about smaller parts." Wholes are defined by their parts, rather than vice versa. Whatever is fundamental
in the universe must exist on the smallest scales. It preferences "bottom-up" explanations over "top-down" ones.

For example, consider explaining why balloons take on a spherical shape. We could explain this in terms of the fact that the roughly spherical shape will best equalize pressure, a top-down explanation. Alternatively, we could describe it solely through a description of molecules bouncing off one another. Smallism would tend to preference the latter, and that might very well be the right approach in that example, but bottom-up explanations don't always seem possible (e.g. the heat carrying capacities of metals).

On the face of it, parts being defined by the whole of which they are a part seems like it could be equally valid. However, I can certainly see why smallism is popular. One of the best ways to figure out how something works is to break it down, and narrowing your focus can also make a problem more soluble. So, I think the popularity of the idea stems from how successful decomposition has been as a research method.

I think problems crop up when this tendency graduates from being a general approach to figuring things out to a metaphysical position about the nature of reality. For one, there are some phenomena that we have good reasons to think might not be reducible to their parts (e.g. molecular structure). The whole idea of fundamentality adds another wrinkle (e.g. fields that fill the entire universe in some ways appear more fundamental than particles.) There are good arguments that computation isn't decomposable this way either, and there is a lot of support for pancomputationalism in the physics community, which would entail that smallism is simply a flawed position.

I don't know if it just has something to do with how compelling a person finds science, or something like that.

I think that might be right in a way. A lot of scientific knowledge comes from breaking things down, which lends credence to the smallist account. That said, a great many scientists don't buy into smallism and a lot of our best explanations come in top-down forms, so I could see how it might depend on exactly which science you delve into the most. Neuroscience tends to be very bottom up, particularly because we lack good top-down theories for major phenomena like consciousness. Physics tends to have a lot of top-down explanations.

My $0.02 is that smallism itself is a speculative proposition, and if chemists, working in a field as mature as any, are still debating if molecular structure is reducible, then it isn't on particularly solid ground.

The physicalist sees a "dead" universe, so to speak. Scientists don't consider the possibility that the universe is alive or developing according to psychological rules.

True. Although I've considered before that if you accept computational theory of mind, still the most popular theory in cognitive science, then nothing necessarily precludes the entire universe from being conscious or becoming conscious. Not panpsychism, but a "cosmic mind" having very slow thoughts, the stuff of click bait articles to be sure, but possible!

Embodied cognition just aims to explain some features of functionality. But I admit that the term kind of irritates me. It's not like we overlooked the relationship between mind and body as we went about discovering how the body works.

Yeah, I don't love it either. And it seems like common sense, but when it comes to debates about compatibilism, etc. it is nice to have a set of ideas summed up in one term, expressing how people aren't just brains, and how our actions are constantly changing the environment, so that identifying the "will" in time and space gets rather tricky.

For Nietzsche the self is a community, divided within itself, made of competing drives. We dont decide to will what we will . We find ourselves willing...


The implication of this is that Nietzsche wasn’t advocating self-actualization, as if we can choose a path or value system and stay the course. We fall into these paths, and then fall out of them into other values. What we can do is choose not to deny or repress the fact that whatever we want and prefer will end up morphing in directions we can’t predict or control, and we just make things worse by embracing moral or empirical notions of truth that pretend that there are firm grounds ( objective scientific and ethical verities) to attach ourselves to. There is much more suffering attached to this way of thinking than there is to rejecting the idea of a self-determining ego and an objective worldly order in favor of being receptive to the creative possibilities wrapped up within what we first encounter as the unpredictable, the painful and negative.

If we don't decide what we will, and if we can't choose our paths, and "fall into" our values, in what way can we choose to embrace or not embrace moral or empirical notions of truth? It seems like we have some capacity for truth and self-determination or we don't, and if we don't, then books about self-overcoming are useless. And why the focus on being controlled by bad ideas?

It always seemed to me that Nietzsche's fatalism was more about attitude, and left plenty of room for self-determination. Maybe "self-actualization" is the wrong term, but I always took him as advocating for something at least similar.

...I do not think that one can read Nietzsche at any phase of his career without being swamped with the impression that, as my students would put it, "he tells us how to really live!" Of course, my students are also stymied by the question, "What is Nietzsche telling us about how to live?" as are we more seasoned commentators. But the seeming lack of specificity in Nietzsche's proposals... does not mean that his is not first and foremost an existential, one might even say moralistic, philosophy.

As for his fatalism:

One powerful argument in favor of Nietzsche's strong sense of responsibility, quite apart from any thesis regarding free will, is his heavy use of what I call the blaming perspective, according to which people are held accountable as the authors or agents of their actions. Of course, their actions can also be praised and they can be forgiven, but I think "blame" best captures the essence of this perspective, both as Nietzsche pursues it and, admittedly, as he sometimes exemplifies it as well. The blaming perspective presupposes a robust sense of agency. It thus tends to emphasize responsibility and be suspicious of excuses. To be sure, in On the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche urges us both to get "beyond good and evil" (Essay I) and to get over our felt need to judge, to blame, and to punish (Book II). But it would be difficult to read virtually any of Nietzsche's writing without noticing the harsh denunciations that permeate his style...

Nietzsche professes disgust with the blaming perspective, but he nevertheless exemplifies it more than any other philosopher. He holds people responsible for what they do, but as exemplary of their "natures" and their virtues and not only because of their choices and decisions.


...Nietzsche's fatalism is clearly not a metaphysical thesis. It rather harks back to his beloved pre-Socratic Greek tragedians. It is an aesthetic thesis, one that has more to do with literary narrative than with scientific truth. In this sense, fatalism has little to do with determinism. There need be no specifiable causal chain. There is only the notion of a necessary outcome and the narrative in which that necessity becomes evident. Thus Oedipus was "fated" to do what he did, whatever causal chain he pursued...


...his "fatalism" consists almost entirely of his intimate and enthusiastic engagement with what Leiter calls "classical fatalism," where this must be understood as not only the fatalism of the ancients (Sophocles, Aeschylus, Heraclitus) but as a rich way of viewing our lives in which we are neither victims of chance and contingency nor Sartrian "captains of our fate." One might even say, alluding to one of Nietzsche's better-known bits of euphoria, that we are more like the oarsmen of our fate, capable of heroic self-movement but also swept along in an often cruel but glorious sea.

Nietzsche may be unclear about the extent to which character is agency and how character and specific actions are related, but he is very clear about the fact that we, whatever we are "given" in our natures, are responsible for cultivating our character. Not that this is easy. Nietzsche tells us, "Giving style to one's character—a great art. But whether rare or commonplace, whether limited to a few "higher men" or something that we all do, cultivating one's character goes hand in hand with Nietzsche's conception of fatalism.

...One becomes what one is. And if one believes—as I think anyone not blinded by ideology or an empty "humanism" must believe—that we are all talented and limited in different ways (including what we might call our meta-talents, such as self-discipline, which have to do with our ability to foster our talents), then it more or less follows that we are free to development our talents (free, that is, insofar as we have the talent). But we are not free regarding what talents we have and, therefore, what talents we might choose to develop. I say "more or less" here because of a number of pretty obvious qualifications: most people have more than one talent and are therefore free to choose among them, and the development of any talent can be thwarted by any number of external and internal factors, such as lack of opportunity, the absence of adequate role models or exemplars, a paucity of praise and encouragement or (worse) an excess of discouragement and even ridicule, or a debilitating mishap or accident.

Robert Solomon - Nietzsche on Fatalism and "Free Will"

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/24092#REF23

And I'm inclined to agree with Nietzsche in a lot of this. But the funny thing is that, pace Nietzsche and Solomon's article, there is a lot of this in Patristic thought (e.g., Saint Augustine's view of our status as pilgrims in the "earthly city.").

Maybe that's the part I dislike most about Nietzsche, the tendency to misrepresent and heap scorn on people only to recapitulate their positions. Aside from being an aesthetic problem, it leads to missing some important things. For instance, it seems obvious that, aside from different people having differing talents for self-control and discipline, that these can also be developed, and to some degree, taught. They can also be fostered or frustrated by the social environment.

This has relevance for Nietzsche's take on asceticism. I think he has some brilliant insights on the ways in which people dominate themselves in self-destructive ways to give themself a sense of control, to be tyrants over their corner of the universe. However, this is not true of all asceticism. The word itself comes from the routines of athletes, and where it is employed by thinkers like Saint John of the Cross, it serves a similar practical purpose vis-a-vis our meta talents. Such asceticism enhances our ability to "become who we are," (as well as a higher mystical purpose).

Plenty of philosophers have held that the self/person is a disordered, composite entity. This is key to Plato's anthropology. And yet we do have this limited, constrained capacity for self-direction. Where does this come from?

I tend to agree with Plato that rationality is the place to look. Nietzsche has a point that there is a problem with the tyranny of the intellect, a position he foists onto the Platonic/Christian tradition. But the actual tradition has both rationality and empathy/the aesthetic sense harmonizing the disordered self. I find this view compelling.

Plus, the entire idea of philosophy, particularly existentialism, as well as therapy, sort of falls apart if the intellect can't do anything to harmonize the person. If that was true, doing such philosophy would be like trying to reform a group of people by talking to someone none of them pay any attention to. Implicit in the act of writing this sort of stuff itself is a sort of concession to the idea that reason plays a crucial role in "becoming who we will be."

The other problem is when this fatalism is applied to the social sphere. It is very true that we have limited control over our environment. Yet, in the aggregate, institutions possess an emergent capability to have immense influence on the environment, and through that influence, individual character. The focus on the immutability of character for the individual, aside from being overblown in Nietzsche IMO, can become downright noxious when applied to the social sphere and towards people groups. E.g., Richard Hanania's white supremacism, which would be noxious even if he didn't apply his philosophy along racial lines.

And, IMO, a moral philosophy needs to translate up to the social sphere.

I think the terms do overlap for philosophy of mind. It's in ontology when I see more room between them. In ontology, physicalism is normally packaged with ideas about supervenience, causal closure, and to a lesser extent, smallism, that I don't see as being essential to naturalism. Plus, if they were to become synonyms then what do we do about all the idealists who claim to be naturalists but not physicalists! (Or the physicalists who appeal to non-natural, eternal propositions to explain language)

A number of writers make a distinction between physicalism and naturalism on the basis of the inclusion or exclusion of the role of subjective point of view in the determination of the object.

This too.

As to Thompson, this is a good description of the sort of backdoor dualism that can creep into physicalism, and substantial problems with popular versions of it. I'm very sympathetic to realist intuitions, but I think there is a serious problem in trying to define realism in terms of entities' "mind-independence" when the very fact that we are thinking of them shows they are, in a crucial way, not independent of our minds. The only realism that would seem to work to me would be a realism that wraps around/contains the subjective/objective distinction, rather than trying to reduce one to the other.

True. So maybe physicalism has never been an explanation. Maybe it represents a certain mindset? A way of problem solving?

Maybe. I just don't see how physicalism differentiates itself from the wider umbrella of naturalism in that case though. I can't think of any reason why objective idealists, dualists, or physicalists couldn't overlap completely on methodology. "Methodological physicalism," seems like a misnomer to me. It seems like it would just be naturalism + a certain set of theory laden ideas. The difference isn't in the methodology, but in contents of the theory ladenness.

One of the outcomes is that if a person is struggling emotionally, they're likely to be piled high with medications meant to support them. To the extent that doing that works, that's the argument for physicalism

This is a good point. I suppose if you have faith in some sort of superveniance relationship where biochemistry reducibly causes mental life, then maybe pharmaceutical treatments seem more plausible. But the way such treatments are selected generally rests on an ontologically neutral set of methodologies.

Plus, I always like to distinguish between physicalism as a philosophy of mind versus physicalism as an ontology. As a philosophy of mind, I think physicalism has some killer arguments that suggest it gets at least some crucial details right. Physicalist philosophy of mind also doesn't have the same need for reductionism to be coherent, minds don't need to reduce to brains, embodied cognition still works, etc. Physicalism as an ontology seems to have significantly larger issues, both with evidence and coherence.



I think you get a lot right here, especially in terms of people not really having taken that much time to consider the issue deeply. That said, I wouldn't underestimate the degree to which reductive physicalism is the default view of the public, and seen broadly as what "science says the world is like."

If I get into debates about free will and people embrace fatalism or are simply afraid fatalism can't be overcome, 9 times out of 10 the reason they think fatalism is true is because:

1. Minds are caused by brain activity.
2. Brains are made of atoms and everything they do can be explained in terms of how atoms act.
3. Atoms lack intentionality.
4. Ergo, intentionality is in some way illusory.

And this is also why compatibilism doesn't seem appealing to them. The problem isn't just that the mind is determined by what comes before any volitional act, it's that mental life has no causal efficacy because real causal power rests with the atoms and molecules. Often I also see a conflation where "if determinism is true then reductionism/smallism is also true," so that evidence for determinism (strong in some contexts IMO) becomes evidence for smallism (weak IMO).

I also found this view to be dominant in neuroscience when I was in school, far more than I have found it to be dominant with physics writers themselves. I think part of the reason for this is the fact that, as mentioned above, physicalism re philosophy of mind is more convincing then physicalism as an ontology, but it's easy to conflate them and take evidence for the former as being evidence for the latter.



I don't think physicalism is anti-science. It certainly can be, but so can idealism or dualism. Dogma and presuppositions invariably affect science, theory ladenness, etc. Physicalism is a philosophical standpoint, and it's key exponents are generally quite aware of this. But I do think you get at a real phenomena where it is possible to conflate physicalism with science, and this can have deleterious effects for how people view or practice science.

I think you're right, but this has at times been identified as a flaw in superveniance that needs to be corrected. What many physicalists would like to say is that the physical facts underlying any mental facts are more essential, and that the physical in some way causes the mental. This shows up in some formulations of the causal closure principle. If they just track together, then there is no reason for us not to talk about mental events having causal efficacy and driving physical events, and no reason to think of one as fundemental. But this would cut against "all causes are ultimately physical."

Granted, I think a great deal of people with this more aggressive view would still say it's fine to talk about mental causes as pragmatic short hand, but they are still supposed to be not only reducible to the physical, but in some way dependant on the physical in a way that the physical is not dependent on the mental.

If you abandon the idea of the physical being fundemental and the mental being caused-by/emerging from the physical (and not vice versa) then it appears like the monosubstance from which all things emerge being "physical" doesn't really explain anything.

This is the ontology he lays out in "The Idea of the World," which is a collection of essays from different times, so it might very well be he has changed his ideas since the. It is in his arguments against physicalism, not in his positive claims for his own substitute, that he talks about how "all the evidence for a physical external world is just as much evidence for an external mental world."

The positive ontology is based on claims that such objects are essentially "composed of mentation." They are ideas/thoughts in a cosmic mind and we, individual minds, a disassociated parts of the universal mind. It's not a process metaphysic where change is fundemental. It doesn't really draw much on the old idea of ousia except in that the focus is on some "thing," the universal mind and its mentation, being fundemental, not change and process as in a process metaphysics. That's all I mean by "substance," here, that there is an ontologically primitive type of thing that exists, whose interactions produce the apparent variety and change we see around us (with or without strong emergence, but probably without given Kim's arguments), as opposed to flux and process being fundemental. Substance is the "substrate" or "prime matter," a concept that seems necessary to make superveniance or causal closure work, at least in forms I am familiar with.


He sort of discusses this here: https://www.bernardokastrup.com/2022/01/reality-is-nothing-and-everything-at.html?m=1

The second thing to notice is that the 'nothing' I am talking about is a mental nothing, not an absolute nothing; it is a mental substrate without substance in the exteriorized sense we use the word 'substance,' not an absence of substrate. As such, I am talking about no-thing, rather than nothing, if we understand for 'things' entities that seem to exist outside mind. My no-thing has an ontological essence (namely, mentality) that exists; it's not an ontic vacuum. This is clear throughout the clip even without its full context, as I constantly speak of a (universal) mind trying to make sense of the fact that it creates everything out of no-thing. My position is thus different from Rovelli's absolute nothing, in which the whole universe is like movement but there is nothing that moves. In my case, there is mind 'moving.'

Also relevant, is that, IMO, Rovelli's ideas probably would qualify as a process metaphysics, and that seems to be the difference he is highlighting. When reading Rovelli's Helgoland, it occured to me that his "entanglement is necessarily a dance for three," idea could easily be adopted to pansemiotic theories. "Relations are fundemental," for Rovelli, and these are always in flux, a process; which would be the same if we conceptualized them as semiosis, which is also a process.




No, I'm afraid I've never heard the name before. The guy who does Coursers courses and teaches at Erasmus University? (Found that through Google)

It's worth pointing out that Kim himself says his arguments seem to shut the door on a non-reductive physicalism grounded in substance metaphysics. He allows that a process metaphysics could allow for a non-reductive physicalism.

Bickhard makes a compelling argument that we we should be looking at substance metaphysics anyhow. The story of science, so he says, is the story of the idea of sui generis substances being discarded and process explanations adopted in their stead. Heat turned out to be process, not the substance caloric. Fire turned out to be the process of combustion, not the substance phlogiston. Life turned out to be definable as a far from equilibrium thermodynamic process, not in terms of vital substance. "Fundemental" particles revealed themselves to have beginnings and ends, vacuum a seething sea of virtual particles. Thus, apparent substance seems to be revealed to simply be longer term stabilities in process.

The litany was compelling to me at least. Terrance Deacon cites some similar arguments in "Incomplete Nature." But I'm not sure exactly how this relates to physicalism, since I'm not sure if the term would mean in a process view, where causal closure and superveniance no longer seem relevant.

Do you expect the “real” reasons for these developments to be available outside of all culturally influenced interpretation?

No. I'm actually quite a fan of speculative history.

What I am saying is that the method is easy to do poorly, and in some respects Nietzsche does it very poorly indeed. His Plato is almost a gnostic, and it is indeed hard to see why he would have become so influential. But because Nietzsche's claims do depend on the supposed failures of all prior thinkers, it is indeed relevant if past thinkers appear only as shadowy ghosts of themselves or pale strawmen. That and, it's possible to do history without commiting to the genetic fallacy.

And this is ironic since, where I think Nietzsche gets the most right, he doesn't actually differ from Plato very much. When Socrates throws back his cloak and starts spouting divinely inspired dithrayambs in praise of love he seems very Dionysian and life affirming indeed. Overcoming ressentiment, rigid ideologies, cultural biases — all in Plato. But I think that Plato also gets at other things worth overcoming, and has a good argument for why an attitude of love frees one from being externally determined. So the baby gets thrown out with the bath water and then like, half the baby gets recovered, but the claim is that our half baby is totally new, or something like that.

That, and I simply disagree with some conclusions. Socrates is a step up as the tragic hero. A man who is willing to die because he loves what is good in life so much. This is in no way a step down from Achilles, running off to pout because he had to set his rape slave free because he was getting his brethren killed in droves, who then gets his friend killed due to his sulking, and goes on a murder spree to cope. Even on purely aesthetic grounds, Socrates is more compelling, even as a heroic figure (he fights the Spartans without the benefits of invulnerability.)

What's the starting point for an idealist? Don't you have to adopt a position that is contrary to our innate noetic structure?

There are different flavors of idealism, but in general they have the same starting point as physicalism. The external world and other minds exist. This would include modern forms of idealism, e.g. Kastrup, or Hegelian absolute idealism. They simply claim that the external world is made of mental substance. Or , in the case of absolute idealism, they claim that the physical and mental are both subsumed in the larger category of the Absolute, but that we can work across these boundaries because both emerge from the same rational structure. Platonic idealism would be another example where there is no denial of the external world. These would all be types of "objective idealism," if you will. I don't find Kastrup's proposed ontology very convincing, but his attacks on physicalism in the "Idea of the World" are pretty good, even if they aren't novel.

There are indeed versions of idealism that do radically diverge from our intuitions about the external world. Berkeley would be the canonical example here; "to be is to be perceived." This would be a "subjective idealism."

Arguably, objective idealism does less to mess with our intuitions than some popular versions of physicalism. Because many physicalists embrace a sort of Kantian dualism and indirect realism, such that we don't ever "experience the world," but experience only "representations of the world." But this leaves us with the whole problem of debating which facets of the world only exist in our map of it, versus which exist in the territory of the world itself. Is the world intelligible, rational, and law-like, or is this something our minds project onto the world? Is a sort of logic/Logos at work in the world, or is any such rationality the product of the mind, and if the latter, how does the mind create something (rationality) that doesn't exist in the world it emerges from?

Donald Hoffman's "The Case Against Reality," goes into this pretty well. Our senses evolved to deliver information about fitness payoffs, not truth. This is why we have such a hard time conceptualizing very large (relativity) and very small (quantum mechanics) things. Our intuitions and senses are only designed to work with medium sized objects and don't equip us to know the world "as it is." Perhaps, he suggests, even our entire view of three dimensional space is an illusion.

I would argue these varieties of physicalism have a bigger problem than idealism. If we can't be sure that what is in our "maps" is also in the "territory," then it seems that our physicalism might reveal itself to actually be subjective idealism. All knowledge turns out to be about how the mind represents the world, not the world itself. It is impossible to know anything about the noumena, the world in itself. But then why posit the noumena in the first place? It seems to be a position based solely on intuition and dogma. But our intuition continually turns out to be bad, the world isn't flat, etc. Plus, the noumena's existing or not makes no real difference for us.

Yet if we get rid of the noumena then we don't have a way to explain why all minds should work the same way, and if they don't work the same way and we can't know the intervening noumena, then we are basically all locked in our own seperate worlds. Or maybe we lose grounds for other minds existing entirely?

Idealism avoids this whole can of worms, and to be fair, some flavors of physicalism do as well.

He says he's read every book of Nietzsche and never found a single aphorism on Love and I pointed out well over 30 to him in just 1 book. Count largely gets his opinion of Nietzsche through material like this article you're producing.

I believe I said I did not think Nietzsche had a compelling, coherent theory of romantic/familial/Platonic love, not that he never used words rendered as "love," in translation (which you then preceded to post every instance of, regardless of if they had anything to do with the topic at hand.) "Love of fate," is not romantic love for example, just because it has the word "love," in the phrase. The incel rantings about women are the most regrettable thing the man wrote, and do not constitute a coherent theory on love.



This is a strawman. There are certainly significant problems with the core thesis re liberal democracy, but it does not reduce to "America is the greatest and society cannot get better." Rather, the Last Man thesis might suggest that liberal democracies, America included, are deeply defective.



Sure, and that all helped him be creative. It doesn't change the fact that he is a bad historian of the complexities of Jewish and Christian history.

As I pointed out, Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Hegel (plus plenty more) can't all be right about the "real" reasons for historical development of Judaism and Christianity. Hegel was also a gifted student and an avid student of the Greeks from an early age. This applies for most of these guys, due to the ubiquity of classical education.

Yet Hegel and Nietzsche (and Marx, etc.) come to radically different conclusions about the origins and psychological underpinnings or Christianity. This is in part because they have been exposed to radically different aspects of the faith. For Nietzsche, the defining exposer seems to be the German Protestant moralism of his era. For Hegel, it's German mysticism, Eckhart and Boehme. As a result, they almost describe different religions despite both being smart and well educated, and indeed, different forms of Christianity, as with sects in other faiths, essentially are different religions.

What these authors all have in common is that they have explanations of religion that just happen to dovetail exactly with what they want to say re contemporary society, humanity etc. They also do not produce anything like what would be considered good professional history, glossing over millennia of extreme diversity to aid their reductive pronouncements.

My point then, is that Nietzsche is, to some extent, right in his critique of prior thinkers. People know where they want to end up and work backwards from there. This is very obvious in some cases. Early in his career, Saint Augustine is very obviously working to make catholic Christianity fit with Porphery and Plotinus. But this can't be the whole story. Because we also see stuff like Augustine abandoning his project, precisely because his own thought led him to see his project as flawed.

But this insight isn't as useful as it seems, because it turns out to be a version of the genetic fallacy. "X is wrong because its author had ignoble, ulterior motives for developing the argument," is itself a bad argument. Plenty of great philosophers, logicians, and scientists have been motivated by chips on their shoulders, a desire to bolster their faith, personal feuds, etc., but this hasn't precluded their advancements being sound.

My second point, re the Russell quote, is that you can very easily turn this same sort of analysis back on Nietzsche. This is not supposed to be a critique of the content on Nietzsche's philosophy (although I have given some of that elsewhere) but the form. Showing some line of thinking is grounded in resentment doesn't show that it is wrong.

And if it works to psychoanalyze a 2,800 year old religious tradition that has evolved across multiple continents based on scant engagement with its core thinkers, then it's certainly ok to psychoanalyze an individual based on their specific writings, letters, personal papers, and biography, which is what Russell is doing (rather uncharitably) in the quote I provided. I personally don't think this works, it devolves into insults incredibly quickly. And I personally don't find Nietzsche's history of Judaism particularly convincing, in that "slave morality," can be identified in plenty of other cultures, organically developing without Jewish influence, and because pre-Exilic Judaism actually doesn't seem to be a good candidate for the "slave morality" label. It isn't that different in many ways from all other Near Eastern societies.



That's fair. Lots of thinkers have good ideas that nonetheless need future thinkers to make workable. I don't think this gets around the problem in Nietzsche's thinking in isolation though. This is relevant in that, ironically, no philosopher tends to have modern disciples treat their corpus more as a sort of Holy Scripture (maybe Marx is a competitor here).

I personally don't see how coercion employed by the strong/higher man is unNietzschean. He seems to be saying quite the opposite in many passages.

Or perhaps the West is engaged in neo-colonialism by trying to foist their "sexual revolution" on to other cultures, undermining gender identities people draw meaning from? :nerd:

The pluralism seems fine to me. The problem is, what happens when people who believe they are Overmen want to reshape society to fit their vision, and don't really much care what other people think given the opposing masses are slavish Last Men, practitioners of slave morality, etc.? It's not like these groups don't already bludgeon each other in the streets.

What stops such a moral system from collapsing into simple egoism or might makes right? We can say it was written for "the few," but that doesn't really resolve the problem, especially not if the higher men must "rule."

Sorry, I think I was misreading you. I was thinking counting being something we "do" was somehow supposed to resolve what I see as the crux Wayfarer's quote, re the physical nature of the mind, not the status of abstract objects. Abstraction being something we do makes a lot of sense to me.

The proliferation of types of abstract objects has always made me skeptical of them.

Physicalists accept this axiom because it is indeed all that's needed to account for everything known to exist - i.e. it's the most parsimonious ontology.

This is exactly what idealists claim, in favor of their own position. No one has ever observed the noumena, it's impossible. Every empirical observation ever has been phenomenal. No one has ever had an experience outside of subjective first person experience. Not one datumn has informed a scientific paper anywhere that wasn't experienced in the mind.

Thus, everything is mental. This is equally parsimonious, perhaps more because it doesn't need to explain why there seems to be a different sorts of stuff, mental life and physical stuff. Science, so the claim goes, is our empirical study of how mental stuff, phenomena, works. Nothing that is not mental has ever been observed. Claiming otherwise would be to claim that one has perceived something without their mind, seen without their vision, yadda, yadda, yadda.

I don't see how that position is anymore ad hoc. All the evidence that is used to support the claim that "everything that has been discovered to date is physical," could equally be used to support the claim that "everything discovered to date has been mental." What such evidence actually amounts to seems to be more a refutation of dualism than support for either position.

But the fact that such evidence can't decide the issue makes me question how useful the distinction is in the first place.