It's odd that you rule out the possibility I'm right. — Relativist

It's not a personal issue. It is physicalism that I'm critical of, not you in particular. See response above.

I wasn’t expecting a response, and a well-spoken one at that. So…thanks.

I’ll address just this one item, the rest being uncontentious other than relevant particulars:

The issue is that nothing tells you about or can articulate an "intrinsic" nature of things. — Apustimelogist

I understand nature of things to mean real material things. Even so, I’m of the opinion metaphysics can articulate the intrinsic nature of me, whether or not the mere satisfaction I get from it reflects the truth.

I agree explanations don’t come for free, and I think the fundamental restriction is the human intellect itself. We are, after all is said and done, at the mercy of ourselves.

I don’t believe it, it’s just my preferred explanation*, I don’t hold beliefs. Yes, I am familiar with the interaction problem.
I don’t see it as dualism, although it conforms largely with what is understood as dualism. I see the problems around dualism as a human construct. So where one thinks of substance dualism, for example, I don’t see these as fundamentally different substances, just differing kinds of substance. I entertain both idealistic and materialist ideologies, both atheistic and religious. I don’t see all these divisions as problematic, but rather divisions we have created. That what people think about and talk about are narratives based on an incomplete understanding of our world, coloured by the human condition.That what we don’t know likely vastly outnumbers what we do know. That we really have no idea about existence, because our narratives are developed solely around what we do in the world we were born into. That the basis of the existence we experience is entirely unknown. This is evidenced in the dilemmas any attempt to determine, or understand what existence, or our existence in this world, we come up against.

Surely given the advances in scientific research and human intellect, we would have discovered, or understood existence by know. But we haven’t, maybe we are no further forward in this understanding than prehistoric people. Are we missing something?

More generally, this directly relates to "free will". Physicalism entails compatibilism: any choice you make will be the product of deterministic forces, a set beliefs (dispositions) that are weighed by the mental machinery, and can only produce one specific result. In hindsight, it only SEEMS like a different could have been made. In actuality, no other choice could have been made, given the set of dispositions that existed when the choice was made. So the collective set of dispositions necessarily leads to whatever choice that is actually taken. — Relativist

:100:

I embrace physicalism (generally, not just as a theory of mind) as an Inference to Best Explanation for all facts. You can defeat this only by providing an alternative that better explains the facts.

:up: :up:

I’m not anti-physicalism, I just don’t see aspects of being in the same way. I won’t comment on what Wayfarer is saying about this, as I will almost certainly misrepresent him and confuse, or derail the discussion.

You seemed to answer my question about p zombies in your reply to Mww. What I’m saying about p zombies is that the physicalist account of the our world with conscious beings in is identical to what a p zombie universe would be like if described by a neutral observer. The p zombie would be processing information and internal mental states just as described by physicalism when physicalism is describing conscious beings. The only difference is that it would not be conscious. Absolutely everything else would be identical.

You can defeat this only by providing an alternative that better explains the facts. — 180 Proof

Well spotted, 180! And the only fact that the physicalist doesn't come to terms with, is the reality of her own existenz. But, I get it, people need something to hang on to.

There's nothing in what I say that is 'anti-science' or 'opposed to science'. The only thing I'm opposing, is the application of scientific method to philosophical problems.

that linguistic communication would be impossible if materialism were true. — Wayfarer
I see no reason to believe that. Perhaps you are working with a redundant model of material as 'mindless substance'. If material in all its forms were nothing but mindless substance, then of course it would follow by mere definition that conscious material is impossible. But that is specifically the "question-begging presumption" I was referring to. — Janus

may be simply implying --- based on absence of {empirical or theoretical} evidence to the contrary --- that massive space-occupying Matter*1 --- what we normally mean by the word --- does not have the "right stuff" [necessary qualities or capabilities or potential] to produce weightless spaceless shapeless Mental Phenomena such as verbal communication of ideas. Yet staunch (anti-spiritual) Materialists*2 insist that Matter must possess the potential for Mind. And I provisionally agree, but it's a "question-begging presumption" --- a philosophical hypothesis --- lacking step-by-step evidence or theory of how mundane lumpish matter became Mindful*3. Without an account of the steps & stages of that fortuitous emergence, it's a circular argument. So, the key question here is : what is the "right stuff" for evolving living & thinking Matter?

I too presume that Mind naturally evolved from non-conscious physical predecessors. But I've never seen any scientific evidence or theory that describe, step-by-step, how that transformation could have happened. Moreover, I don't accept that hypothetical-quark-composed Matter was the "fundamental" element of evolution. Instead, as Einstein concluded, time-causing Energy was the primal force behind space-time & evolution, that eventually shape-shifted into various change-causing agents (Gravity, Nuclear Forces, Thermal Energy, Electromagnetic Fields, etc). So, it seems obvious that whatever Causal Principle (possessing the right stuff) produced the Big Bang beginning and subsequent space-time evolution, could-and-did eventually cause Life & Mind processes to emerge. Unfortunately, details of the necessary critical intermediate stages (non-linear Phase Transitions*4) have not yet been documented.

So I'm guessing that the non-sentient precursor of Mental Processes (e.g. linguistic) was more likely the non-spatial, massless stuff of Causation : Energy in all its forms. E=MC^2 has no place for matter. Even Mass is a mathematical measurement of resistance to Force, and C is a mathematical constant, not a measurement of a material object. Therefore, I agree with both Wayfarer and his Materialist critics, but with a twist : massless, spaceless Energy is capable of transforming into both Matter and Mind. But Mind (consciousness) is not a "separate, non-physical entity"*2, it's an active meta-physical brain Process, with no mass or inertia. :nerd:


PS___ This is not a "redundant" model of Matter, but a novel cosmic perspective on the evolution of Mind. Do we want to debate whether Causation has the right-stuff to create linguistic (knowable) noumena within a world of material (observable events & properties) phenomena?


*1. What is Matter? :
In physics, matter is any substance that has mass and occupies space (volume). It is the physical material that makes up the universe and can be found in various states, or phases, such as solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. All matter is ultimately composed of elementary particles like quarks and leptons, which form protons, neutrons, and electrons, which in turn form atoms.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=what+is+matter+in+physics

*2. Materialism is a philosophical view that posits that physical matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all things, including mental states, can be explained by material interactions. In this view, the mind is not a separate, non-physical entity but rather a product of brain processes, and reality is governed by natural, physical laws. This can also refer to a value system that prioritizes material possessions, but in philosophy, it refers to the belief that the physical world is all that exists.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=materialism+philosophy

*3. Ideonomy: A Science of Ideas :
The foundational insight of ideonomy is that ideas are part of the natural world. Just as humans are part of the natural world, the thoughts and ideas generated by human minds are also natural phenomena. Accordingly, we should expect there to be underlying laws or patterns in ideas, the same way we observe laws that govern other natural phenomena. While most phenomena in our universe are examined through a scientific lens, ideas are often treated as magic. Ideonomy aims to remedy this.
https://gracekind.net/writing/ideonomy/intro/
Note --- This is not an actual physical science, but merely a recent instance of a long history of philosophical proposals to combine the tools of concrete Empiricism with those of abstract Reason, in order to put the observing Mind under the microscope, so to speak. For the near future, any "hard" evidence turned-up may be watered-down with imagination & interpretation, as usual with any novel views of reality, such as Quantum Theory.

*4. Phase transition : The process where a substance abruptly changes from one state of matter to another, like a solid turning into a liquid or a liquid into a gas.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=phase+transition
Note --- The "abrupt" change is also non-analytical, so intermediate steps --- the mechanism --- between states are unknown.

That comment of Janus was in response to a gloss of the Platonist scholar Lloyd Gerson, which in turn was a gloss on Aristotle 'D'Anima' ('On the Soul'). It is a very specific argument, that it is the ability of intellect (nous) to grasp forms (universals) that makes communication possible, in that they provide us with a stock of general concepts, which materialism denies (as materialism is generally nominalist.)

Anyway, I'm offsite until 1 December I have some other writing to work on. Chat then.

The only thing I'm opposing, is the application of scientific method to philosophical problems. — Wayfarer

Such as?

Mind (consciousness) is not a "separate, non-physical entity" — Gnomon

It would be a different kind of 'physical'. It had to have evolved, with life, for once there was no life and consciousness on Earth, and now there is.

but it also commits us to a very specific kind of explanation: one where wholes are derivative, and the only truly fundamental realities are the constituents and their interactions. — Wayfarer

Well, no because you can use any level of explanation you find convenient for the task or the part of reality you are interested in.

When we identify something, we identify a gestalt, not an assembly of simples. This is a basic fact of cognition.

A gestalt has properties that no list of constituent parts captures: unity, salience, meaning, intentional relevance. — Wayfarer

And this is just a certain level of explanation in the realm of psychology, where these concepts may have some utility whether on a formal or informal basis, or fundamentally inaccurate/accurate. But that doesn't invalidate the possibility or validity of explanations from the view of neurons as units of information-processing. That doesn't invalidate the fact that if these psychological constructs belong to an organism, then it also belongs to a biological structure made of cells and molecules and fundamental particles, the excitations of quantum fields. There is only one way you can make consistent the plurality of a person, an organism, a brain, a many-particle quantum system, existing within the same vicinity. With appropriate assumptions, we can just see all these characterizations as different ways of looking at the same system at different scales. But if different scales exist, it implies that descriptions on one scale under appropriate assumptions are due to appropriate coarse-graining of descriptions on a smaller scale. I don't see how you can get out of that, it doesn't really work the other way round.

The point is that the reductive strategy that works for chemistry or planetary motion is not obviously suited to phenomena whose defining characteristics are holistic, structured, and inherently perspectival. If explanation bottoms out in simples, yet consciousness and cognition are inherently gestalt-like, then either: — Wayfarer

The thing is that the only difficulty here in psychology is qualia. But there is no problem for anything else. People create computational models to explain perceptual phenomena, cognition, behavior all the time, and these models can be based around neuronal-type architectures. And maybe at some point computational models will also be able to give us insights into neural or information processing correlates of reports of our own experiences like "gestaltness". No you can't explain experiential qualities, but I see nothing stopping anyone in principle from giving causal explanations to our behaviors and reports associated with those experiences. And thats all really science wants to or needs to explain. What a psychological or neuroscience wants to produce is a working p-zombie, because that would give you everything you need to know about why behaviors happen, including meaning. Because to me, meanings can be nothing more than our behaviors and reaction and predictions concerning things we see in the world, similar to but more general than the idea of 'meaning is use'.

Here, you're committing the 'mereological fallacy'. This is central to an infliuential book, The Philosophical Foundations of Neurosciences, Hacker and Bennett (philosopher and neuroscientist, respectively): — Wayfarer

You see, I think your approach is undermined by this reductionism, the conviction that basic physical level is the only real one, to the extent that you can't even consider any alternative. You simply assume that philosophy must defer to physics, as if that can't even be in question. — Wayfarer

The problem is that you like to reify concepts to the extreme where they should not be mixed or made to touch. Whereas I think we are looking at the same world through a plurality of tools.and concepts at different scales which are different but nonetheless will overlap or inform about each other. And we should make use of tools and concepts when there is explanatory interest in doing so.

Someone can identify someone else as drunk in a completely in formal way with no scientific training or definitions, and the drunkenness is simply a property of what someone sees in someone else's behavior. That doesn't mean that the chemical structure of alcohol and how it affects a brain is not relevant to explaining what someone is seeing and characterizing in a different way under a different perspective. They are all windows onto the same world that are interlinking.

Similarly, I can talk about our explanations and descriptions being limuted by the brain because there is good empirical reason to think that is the case. If I were to inject a excitotoxic chemical into your right hippocampus that destroys your neural tissue, it will be associated with a dysfunction in your ability to think in certain ways even though "thinking" is quite an abstract, nebulous phrase that probably is easier understood in the daily conversations of people and their own experiences than from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience.

I just don't understand this kind of pedantry which spits in the face of blatant facts about how biology relates to experiences. We should be using the full range if concepts and explanations to talk about the world so for instance we.can have experiences as one level of description on one hand related to our daily lives, but we can also talk about the very same systems, organisms, people in terms of brains or how brains affect experiences, behaviors, reports. It seems that I am actually advocating for the complete opposite of what you think I am - usign the full range of conceptual tools and explanations to alk about things. But that doesn't change facts that when you zoom-in onthe region of space in the vicinity of your body and head, you will find neurons, molecules, the validity of physical descriptions that can be causally connected to how we experience and see things.

Its very hard for me to see how one can argue that levels of explanation on a larger scale are somehow not less fundamental compared to descriptions on smaller scales where you zoom-in. I don't think it even makes logical sense. Like its fine to say that we have two different explanations on two different scales describing the same part of the universe, and these two explanations are just different, maybe incomplete, maybe difficult to link together - like say a mundane description of an economy or game of cricket or religious ceremony vs. a physical statistical mechanical description of the physical interactions in an entire city or in a game of cricket or a religious ceremony. But its difficult for me to look at these two descriptions on even terms. There is an asymmetry there somewhere between the more abstract descriptions on a larger scale vs. the smaller scale one.

I see omly one way to make descriptions at different scales consistent if they exist in the same universe. That doesn't mean we need to restrict ourselves to one fundamental level of explanation all the time.

In my brand of physicalism, I will agree with my own claim that I am experiencing something, just that to say that I am experiencing something doesn't add anything to the p-zombie account. But the subtlety is that my p-zombie account just is cataloging the way we describe the universe in our theories. The theories don't talk about intrinsic natures in the sense as described in Chalmers' book "The Conscious Mind" (pg. 153):


"physical theory only characterizes its basic entities relationally, in terms of their causal and other relations to other entities. Basic particles, for instance, are largely characterized in terms of their propensity to interact with other particles..Their mass and charge is specified, to.be sure, but all that a specification of mass ultimately comes to is a propensity to be accelerated in certain ways by forces, and so on. Each entity is characterized by its relation to other entities, and these entities are characterized by their relations to other entities, and so on forever (except, perhaps, for some entities that are characterized by their relation to an observer). The picture of the physical world that this yields is that of a giant causal flux, but the picture tells us nothing about what all this causation relates. Reference to the proton is fixed as the thing that causes interactions of a certain kind, that combines in certain ways with other.entities, and so on; but what is the thing that is doing the causing and combining? As Russell (1927) notes, this is a matter about which physical theory is silent."

At the same time there would be no duality between intrinsic stuff and physical stuff because the physics is just relational descriptions of events in the intrinsic stuff. You could add a separate consciousness stuff next to the intrinsic "physical stuff" and get dualism. The passage I quoted is in a section about panpsychism which would be the alternative where the intrinsic "physical stuff" is actually just consciousness. My view is that the last option would not really be meaningful. I have no coherent characterization of what conscious experience is or means in a similar way to how physics is silent on the intrinsic nature of things.

There's nothing in what I say that is 'anti-science' or 'opposed to science'. The only thing I'm opposing, is the application of scientific method to philosophical problems. — Wayfarer

Do you regard Inference to Best Explanation as "scientific method"? That's all I've done.

You see, I think your approach is undermined by this reductionism, the conviction that basic physical level is the only real one, to the extent that you can't even consider any alternative. You simply assume that philosophy must defer to physics, as if that can't even be in question. — Wayfarer

I do not "defer to physics". Physics provides a set of facts. A metaphysical theory needs to be able to account for all facts, including (but not limited to) the facts physics presents to us.

If explanation bottoms out in simples, yet consciousness and cognition are inherently gestalt-like, ... — Wayfarer

Whoa! Did you actually make a positive claim? Do you indeed believe the mind is irreducible? Or is this one of those noncommital possibilities (you did say, "if"). What about everything other than mind? You said you accept science.

If you think the mind is irreducible, how does it come into existence?

Yes, I can agree with that. It does still leave quite a large gap to be filled, though. Which is I suppose what this thread is about. The idea that physicalist accounts can go only so far and we should refrain from overstepping their explanatory power.