I think he might mean that “life” and “consciousness” should not be nouns because they aren’t persons, places and things. I don’t think it is beyond reason to suspect the grammar itself could lead to strange theories and conclusions, for instance vitalism.

think he might mean that “life” and “consciousness” should not be nouns because they aren’t persons, places and things. I don’t think it is beyond reason to suspect the grammar itself could lead to strange theories and conclusions, for instance vitalism. — NOS4A2

Life and consciousness actually are things. Pointing out that these words refer to processes doesnt change that. A process is a thing.

So if you're right about his point, he's wrong.

The word “process” is a noun, but it is series of actions. These actions are reified into a noun. For instance the word “jog” can be used as a noun. “I went for a jog”. But is a jog a thing? I think the grammar leads to confusions and unnecessary reifications.

I think the grammar leads to confusions and unnecessary reifications. — NOS4A2

You don't seem confused. Who is?

'Reify' means 'turn into some thing', where 'res' means 'a thing'.

I suspect Mayr's complaint is that, in line with Darwinian materialism. the notion that life and mind can be understood in terms anything other than the Darwinian has to be snuffed out. So he's objecting to the notion that life and mind are real in any sense apart from what can in principle be known to the objective sciences.

One can agree that life and mind ought not to be reified, i.e. conceived of as objectively existent things, without however agreeing with Mayr's materialism. Reification might be faulty because they transcend any objective definition. So, sure, they do not exist as entities, but in their absence, what entities could there be?

So, Mayr might be correct as far as it goes, but he shouldn't, on that account, draw any philosophical conclusions, because his is not a philosophical argument, but a methodological consideration. Excluding considerations which are not amenable to scientific analysis, does not mean that the subject of such considerations are not real.

Reification might be faulty because they transcend any objective definition. — Wayfarer

How would we know whether they transcend definition?

Because they can’t be objectively specified or defined.

Think about the objects of physics. They are the objectively-measurable entities par excellence. You can specify everything about them to enormous degrees of accuracy - well, up to a point, when it comes to sub-atomic physics, it becomes fuzzy. But that doesn’t undermine the point, which is that modern science primarily concerns itself with what is objectively measurable; that is one of the hallmarks of empiricism. But the nature of mind evades such an easy characterisation; notice that Mayr attempts to ‘ground’ the description by saying ‘well it’s simply one of the attributes of animals’, thereby attempting to ‘objectify’ it.

This whole process of ‘objectification’ and what can and cannot be described in objective terms is one of the, if not the, central problem of modern philosophy.

:up:

I suspect Mayr's complaint is that, in line with Darwinian materialism. — Wayfarer

I agree. I think Mayr's complaint is about Christianity. It is about calling Providence a thing, an entity, and actually existing thing.

Or calling the soul a thing. It is reified, inasmuch as "souls will burn in hellfire for ever and ever" while souls have typically no parts made of matter, especially made in China. And if it's not made in China, it's not made anywhere.

Things that are not made of matter can't burn, because burning is nothing but combining with oxygen, which is material.

Therefore why would life and consciousness be problematic? — frank

It is not a problem for me. Yes, sometimes I am behind the rent, and sometimes I wonder why people argue with Descartes' Cogito Ergo Sum, but by-and-large, I am friends with life and consciousness.

At best the point isnt one that usually needs to be made. At worst, this is wrong. Both life and consciousness most certainly do exist. — frank

I think you jumped over some of the text your very own self quoted.

Mayr does not deny the existence of mind, life, soul, etc. He merely says they are not entities by themselves, they are dependent on other things.

As N0S4ATOO point it out, too, processes exist but can't be treated as objects.

Car factories put together cars. The factory takes in raw materials, and puts those together to make a car. No raw materials, no cars. No putting together, no cars. So both raw materials and putting together exist, otherwise there would be no cars.

However, the putting together is a process, not a thing. This is very clear so far isn't it.

So mind, which we each experience, and consiousness, and life, are processes. When the person dies, presumably his mind, consciousness and life stops, because those processes are dependent on the body, as they are functions, or processes, in the body.

You, @Frank and @Wayfarer agree, that mind is not something material. So if it's not made of matter, what is it made of? There is nothing to make things out of in this world, but matter.

So is it a process? By process of elimination, yes, mind is a process. So is life.

I don't see any problem with that.

Oh, one more thing: the nature of process, as an existing thing without it being matter, but its existence hinging upon other things:

I went jogging. Does jogging exist? Yes, because if it did not exist, I would not happen around the block, and I would not happen to lose so much weight at once.

But can I put jogging on the mantle, or can I hang it in the closet? No.

There you go. One of the, if not the central, questions of modern philosophy solved for you, @Wayfarer. All you have to do is to get rid of the thousands of years of distilled dogma that some educators poisoned your mind (i.e. brain processes) with.

sorry, it's hard for me to follow what you're saying.

Darwinian materialism — Wayfarer

Does Darwin have an interest in this topic? An what is Darwinian materialism?

↪god must be atheist sorry, it's hard for me to follow what you're saying. — frank

Either you are jesting with me, or else you have a closed mind. No problem, I will live with not having reached you.

I think this may be true of adolescents, but I don't think an adult will have a problem understanding, for instance, that the Law involves processes as opposed to being a blob of Stuff. — frank

A body is a set of processes, but it is also a blob. Or at least, calling it a blob, certainly for certain middle-aged overweight men, is not misleading.

"As far as the words “life” and “mind” are concerned, they merely refer to reifications of activities and have no separate existence as entities. — frank

A body is processes or activities and so 'body' is a reification. At the same time I think is fair to call them separate entitites, each one. Perhaps minds are like this. The might not be physical entities - or perhaps the word physical is really rather misleading, since many things considered real and physical in science are not blobs - but they might be entities.

A body is processes or activities and so 'body' is a reification. — Coben

You know how to completely mess things up, don't you.

Mind is not made of matter. The body is. Mind is a function of the body. You are denying this, and you are making actual material blobs into processes, which is outright false. It's like calling a brick a process.

Why, oh why do people put their religion before their reason? Religion can co-exist with reason, you don't have to deny the obvious in order to believe in a god. By denying the obvious, the religious create a resentment in the ranks of the reasonable. It would be much smoother if everyone was of the same faith, or else if philosophy was made into a secular endeavour. Neither is possible, I know, but it would level the playing field, it would remove humongous obstacles to agreement.

You know how to completely mess things up, don't you. — god must be atheist

Compliment?

You are denying this, and you are making actual material blobs into processes, which is outright false — god must be atheist

Are you saying that my body is not a collection of processes?

It's like calling a brick a process. — god must be atheist

It sure looks like one at the atomic level. And then if we go deeper to the quantum level the whole thing is made up of probable and shifting locations of stuff that is sort of wave, sort or particles.

Why, oh why do people put their religion before their reason? — god must be atheist

Who said anything about religion?

Religion can co-exist with reason, you don't have to deny the obvious in order to believe in a god. — god must be atheist

Well, actually, I don't think what matter is and what 'physical' means are obvious. The idea of 'physical' has gone way beyond bricks, to include massless particles, fields, 'things' in superpostion....

iow stuff that has very little in common with the matter we think of in everyday life (though this is also like that).

Even mass, that most physical of all sounding qualities is actually a process. It is a resistance to change in location.

Religion can co-exist with reason, you don't have to deny the obvious in order to believe in a god. — god must be atheist

There is very little that is both true and obvious about matter, certainly not when it comes to bodies or when comes to considering issues of processes vs. things.

And why is the person who is representing himself as seeing the obvious and being rational using ad homs and insults? Why isn't the representative of reason, as he posits it, sticking to the arguments?

A body is a set of processes, but it is also a blob. Or at least, calling it a blob, certainly for certain middle-aged overweight men, is not misleading. — Coben

In biology, we do separate the two. When we talk about anatomy, we're talking about the blob of Stuff. We're identifying structures in it: the femur, for instance. Physiology is the realm of processes: metabolism, for instance.

Are you saying blobs should be recognized as processes?

I think the issue may be in the realm of psychology. Those who talk about embodied life and consciousness are, in a sense, talking to themselves. They themselves have a clunky, pre-Maxwellian view of the universe and their struggle to free themselves of it without breaking down into Dionysian lunacy leads them to project out some primitive, superstitious interlocutor.

Strange, but probably true.

Frank, you answered @Coben with the ideas I wanted to tell him.

↪god must be atheist I think the issue may be in the realm of psychology. Those who talk about embodied life and consciousness are, in a sense, talking to themselves. They themselves have a clunky, pre-Maxwellian view of the universe and their struggle to free themselves of it without breaking down into Dionysian lunacy leads them to project out some primitive, superstitious interlocutor.

Strange, but probably true. — frank

It is indeed, strange. Because I don't know what pre-Maxwellian means (other than existing prior to Maxwell House Coffee), Dionysian is another strange enigma for me, and I also don't know what "interlocutor" means.

So the only words you use that are more than one syllable, and they resonate with me, are "talking to myself", "lunacy", and "primitive". Bin der, done dose. Yep, familiarity breeds understanding.

He is clearly wrong, because he is considering both life and living to be the same thing, but regarded as two distinct things by the addition of a reification. He is saying that living is a process, or a state of organisms, whereas life is a complex sentient being due to a reification, but implying that it is the same thing as the state of organisms, so the reification is a mistake.
This is wrong, because the state of living and a life are different things, so no need for a reification. Also a mind and a consciousness are different things. I think this sort of confusion is a result of people trying to reduce humans to the equivalent of a unicellular organism( a blob).

In fact I would suggest that he is doing to opposite to a reification to a living organism by suggesting that it is lesser a thing than a human life. Without realising that a human is a colony of individual cells. It's cells which are living and they have a life and a colony of cells is a human.

Does Darwin have an interest in this topic? An what is Darwinian materialism? — bert1

Read up on the Scottish Enlightenment. It was a big influence on Darwin's thinking. Oriented towards science, away from anything deemed 'spiritual', in line with the Enlightenment on the Continent. So, 'materialist' in the sense of considering underlying physical causes as being the sole drivers of natural processes.

Alfred Russel Wallace, on the other hand, co-discoverer of natural selection, became increasingly oriented around spiritualism later in life and never accepted that natural selection could account for what he called 'the higher faculties'. See his Darwinism applied to Man which concludes

Those who admit my interpretation of the evidence now adduced -- strictly scientific evidence in its appeal to facts which are clearly what ought not to be on the materialistic theory -- will be able to accept the spiritual nature of man, as not in any way inconsistent with the theory of evolution, but as dependent on those fundamental laws and causes which furnish the very materials for evolution to work with. They will also be relieved from the crushing mental burden imposed upon those who--maintaining that we, in common with the rest of nature, are but products of the blind eternal forces of the universe, and believing also that the time must come when the sun will lose his heat and all life on the earth necessarily cease--have to contemplate a not very distant future in which all this glorious earth--which for untold millions of years has been slowly developing forms of life and beauty to culminate at last in man--shall be as if it had never existed; who are compelled to suppose that all the slow growths of our race struggling towards a higher life, all the agony of martyrs, all the groans of victims, all the evil and misery and undeserved suffering of the ages, all the struggles for freedom, all the efforts towards justice, all the aspirations for virtue and the well-being of humanity, shall absolutely vanish, and, "like the baseless fabric of a vision, leave not a wrack behind."

As contrasted with this hopeless and soul-deadening belief, we, who accept the existence of a spiritual world, can look upon the universe as a grand consistent whole adapted in all its parts to the development of spiritual beings capable of indefinite life and perfectibility. — Alfred Russel Wallace

Needless to say, thoroughly rejected by Darwin's contemporaries and subsequent science, although some resonance with later orthogenetic philosophies such as Bergson and Du Chardin.

You, Frank and @Wayfarer agree, that mind is not something material. So if it's not made of matter, what is it made of? There is nothing to make things out of in this world, but matter. — god must be atheist

Interesting question(s) no doubt.

The analogy of 'jogging' made me think of immaterial/material entities and processes and/or metaphysical phenomena. For instance, if one thinks of jogging or rather wants to actually go jogging, somehow either the conscious mind brings it into cognizance, or the subconscious mind creates impulses and/or subliminal imagery relative to the Will (the will to go jogging). In any case, it's an esoteric, immaterial and/or metaphysical process.

If, on the other hand, it [cognition] was not a metaphysical process, then when one wants to go jogging, one could theoretically go to a library and look-up jogging, or refer to a binder somewhere showing images of a person jogging. Which in turn, naturally would involve material entities/processes; not immaterial entities/processes.

And that all would mean every time we will to do something, we would not be able to actually do anything until we were shown an objective reality of that something. In this case, a picture of something.

And even if one were to argue Emergent entities/genetic codes causing action, one would still be left with how they would occur from material reality.

what do you think?

And even if one were to argue Emergent entities/genetic codes causing action, one would still be left with how they would occur from material reality. — 3017amen

I think when we talk about emergence, we're talking about properties of entities, not entities themselves.

IOW, liquidness is an emergent property. If consciousness is emergent, it's as a property of stuff. Properties are things, in English you have to put a "ness" or some such at the end to indicate a necessary relationship.

There is nothing to make things out of in this world, but matter. — god must be atheist

The nature of matter is still an unknown, despite the construction of the largest and most expensive apparatus in history to investigate it. It has lead to many prominent scientists accepting parallel worlds or multiverses. So the idea that matter provides an explanation is hardly grounded in fact.

You, Frank and @Wayfarer agree, that mind is not something material. So if it's not made of matter, what is it made of? There is nothing to make things out of in this world, but matter. — god must be atheist

not true. my hypothesis/theory/model under development, predicts otherwise. There is energy- Energy patterns as an entity in-and of itself. That is, in my model, consciousness, esp. the qualia kind, is pure energy create as a sort of new, and separate entity within the physical entity, yet part the system as a whole. In my model, the 'consciousness' entity is pure energy, being in a resonant whole with the cognitive and sensory/motor systems such that they are effectively a whole, unified entity with all parts in tune and sensing all other parts all at once. This is a physical 'thing' not a process b/c it is an instantaneous resonant wave system inseparable from the physical boundary and propagating media properties/constraints.

The closest analogy I can think of is a macro version of a Bose-Einstein condensate, so maybe a 6th state of matter. Can't say with confidence yet, but I currently see this, along with many other frameworks/mechanics, as a promising framework for me to achieve the qualia aspect of consciousness. For the access aspects of consciousness, I'm modeling that under a sophisticated non-verbal linguistic framework, which are mostly data-structures and processes and I do not expect those will be part of the 'qualia' experience. While I have some potential ideas to try, I have not yet given much thought on how to merge the two, mostly b/c implementing the above qualia approach in a holographic projection framework I have in mind is intellectually quite challenging, to say the least. I have worked out enough formative concepts to intuitively sense that consciousness can be created in a machine as an emergent object. In this way, I would predict that the mind is an energy pattern that is at one with the material that confines/defines, they coexist as a 3rd entity within the system. BTW, under my model, I need something like qualia to get a coherent, accurate, and comprehensive state of being (e.g., how do "I" feel [about this or that[) within the very spread out and disparate cognitive/sensory/motor system.

In my model, the 'consciousness' entity is pure energy — Sir Philo Sophia

where does 'knowing' fit into that? How does it come about?

Yes, this is a point I tend to make in these discussions. Matter or the physical is the label for not only an expanding set of 'things' but the set itself has changed criteria over time: waves, things in superposition, fields, massless particles, dark energy, quantum foam are now in that set. There is no reason to assume the door is closed on what will be included or even what the qualities of things will be. Perhaps 'souls' or other 'things' are on a spectrum within what will be considered physical. Most people work with a dualism, either denying that there is one or assuming there is one. And matter is juxtaposed to the non-material. However we now have material things and processes that perhaps would have made older dualists quite content: Oh, you mean that in your schema matter can be like X and not be like Y? Well, ok, that would cover the entities I consider real but you do not on deductive ontological grounds. There's a confusion of map for territory being used to rule out things. And an old map. The semantics have changed, but everyone is acting like they haven't. The knowledge is not final, as you pointed out, but everyone, on this issue, is acting like it is. Like it must be either a dualism with non-material things or all those things consider supernatural do not exist. And often in theist/atheist debates BOTH sides seem to assume this.

Perhaps 'souls' or other 'things' are on a spectrum within what will be considered physical. — Coben

That seems monumentally unlikely on the face of it. If you look at the other items on your list of recent additions to the set of {things that physically exist}, they're all things whose existence has seemed necessary to meet the needs of otherwise good predictive models. The idea of 'souls' has been abandoned by many for hundreds of years with absolutely no effect on the predictive power of their models, plus, the concept was derived to fit a religious narrative, not to explain any phenomena.

I'm not saying it couldn't happen, but it'd be like someone having just thought of the exact notion of quantum foam 500 years ago, for entirely religious reasons, without any foundation of quantum mechanics to base it on and purely by chance it happening to fit within a model with good explanatory power.

You're taking my argument as an argument (and not a good one) supporting the existence of those things. My post is in response to Wayfarers, and in a context where people think they can rule out, via deduction, things that have been considered non-material, as if 'material' has maintained the same meaning and as if it is even likely the set of material things and even the kinds of qualities material things have and do not have will not continue extending. People in a number of posts here are simply saying 'there is nothing beyond the physical' in the steps of an argument ruling things out that have been considered non-material. I am saying that the idea of the physical/material is not stable so this kind of per se ruling out is not justified.

Well said.