It might be that science is just not set up to answer questions like "what is it like". Myself, I don't think that question has an answer at all. The only way to know what it is like is to experience it. — Ludwig V

As an idealist, I agree.

The irony is that certainty is never obtained in the hard sciences. No scientific theory can ever be proven to be true. While many people fail to understand this fact, it may be that many, or even most, scientists do not fail to understand it. — Janus

Sure. But we don't say, "Well, we can't prove the combustion engine works the way we think it does for the reasons we think it does, so there's no point in making any. After all, what reason do we have to think the next one we make will work?

On the other hand it is possible, although it can never be proven, that the former exist only because of the latter. — Janus

We certainly are not aware of the existence of the former without the latter.

What the 'explanatory gap' and 'hard problem' arguments are aimed at, is precisely that claim. That everything is reducible to or explainable in terms of the physical. That is the point at issue! — Wayfarer

They make clear that everything is not reducible to or explainable in terms of the physical.

Sure. But we don't say, "Well, we can't prove the combustion engine works the way we think it does for the reasons we think it does, so there's no point in making any. After all, what reason do we have to think the next one we make will work? — Patterner

The internal combustion engine is well understood. The understanding of its workings were not the kind of thing I had in mind when I spoke of scientific theories.

We certainly are not aware of the existence of the former without the latter. — Patterner

We are in vivo, and until modern times always were altogether, unaware of neural activity. We don't directly perceive neural activity giving rise to consciousness, we correlate the two on the basis of neural imaging and first person reportage.

When it comes to your example, the internal combustion engine, we do directly see the combustion of the fuel giving rise to motion.

They make clear that everything is not reducible to or explainable in terms of the physical. — Patterner

I think it is undeniably true that most of human life cannot be explained in terms of physics. On the other hand physics certainly seems to be the basis of chemistry and chemistry the basis of life and life the basis of consciousness, and even if this is so it still doesn't follow that emergent systems can necessarily be understood comprehensively in terms of the systems they emerge from. Try understanding poetry, art or music in terms of physics, or even biology, and see how far you get.

A materialist explanation of a work of art would be that it comprises these materials that make up the surface on which the paint is applied, that the various pigments comprise such and such chemical bases, that react together in such and such a way as to produce the various hues and shades that are visible to the observer.

Do you think that such an account, no matter how detailed, will ever satisfy the requirements given here by Tolstoy? — Wayfarer

This interpretation misses a key point - it neglects the artist and the receiver of art, on who Tolstoy's focus was. A painting is merely matter, but a brain is "matter in motion" - involved in complex chemical processes, with capacities for sign, symbol, and meaning.

A painting is merely matter, but a brain is "matter in motion" - involved in complex chemical processes, with capacities for sign, symbol, and meaning. — Questioner

The rules of 'matter in motion' are those of physics. To reduce a phenomenon to physics or chemistry, it is necessary to show that this phenomenon in question can be explained solely in terms of physics and chemistry. How can 'the capacities for sign, symbol and meaning' be reduced to, or explained in terms of, physics and chemistry? Where would you look in physics or chemistry for those explanations?

Besides the 'receiver of art' is not 'a brain'. The subject is not 'a brain'. This is an example of the mereological fallacy - the logical error of attributing properties or actions to a part of something (like the brain) that can only properly belong to the whole (the being).

Apropos of 'capacities of sign, symbol and meaning'. One of the long-time posters here, Apokrisis, has introduced myself and many others to the emerging discipline of biosemiotics. This is, briefly, the application of semiotics to biological processes, from the cellular level upwards. One of the founders of this discipline, Howard Pattee, has this to say about the relationship of signs and matter:

The concept of Biosemiotics requires making a distinction between two categories, the material or physical world and the symbolic or semantic world. The problem is that there is no obvious way to connect the two categories. This is a classical philosophical problem on which there is no consensus even today. Biosemiotics recognizes that the philosophical matter-mind problem extends downward to the pattern recognition and control processes of the simplest living organisms where it can more easily be addressed as a scientific problem. In fact, how material structures serve as signals, instructions, and controls is inseparable from the problem of the origin and evolution of life. Biosemiotics was established as a necessary complement to the physical-chemical reductionist approach to life that cannot make this crucial categorical distinction necessary for describing semantic information. Matter as described by physics and chemistry has no intrinsic function or semantics. By contrast, biosemiotics recognizes that life begins with function and semantics.

Biosemiotics recognizes this matter-symbol problem at all levels of life from natural languages down to the DNA. Cartesian dualism was one classical attempt to address this problem, but while this ontological dualism makes a clear distinction between mind and matter, it consigns the relation between them to metaphysical obscurity. Largely because of our knowledge of the physical details of genetic control, symbol manipulation, and brain function these two categories today appear only as an epistemological necessity, but a necessity that still needs a coherent explanation. Even in the most detailed physical description of matter there is no hint of any function or meaning.

The problem also poses an apparent paradox: All signs, symbols, and codes, all languages including formal mathematics are embodied as material physical structures and therefore must obey all the inexorable laws of physics. At the same time, the symbol vehicles like the bases in DNA, voltages representing bits in a computer, the text on this page, and the neuron firings in the brain do not appear to be limited by, or clearly related to, the very laws they must obey. Even the mathematical symbols that express these inexorable physical laws seem to be entirely free of these same laws. — Physics and Metaphysics of Biosemiology, Howard Pattee

This is a far cry, however, from describing the brain as 'matter in motion'.

Apropos of 'capacities of sign, symbol and meaning'. One of the long-time posters here, Apokrisis, has introduced myself and many others to the emerging discipline of biosemiotics. This is, briefly, the application of semiotics to biological processes, from the cellular level upwards. One of the founders of this discipline, Howard Pattee, has this to say about the relationship of signs and matter:

The concept of Biosemiotics requires making a distinction between two categories, the material or physical world and the symbolic or semantic world. The problem is that there is no obvious way to connect the two categories. This is a classical philosophical problem on which there is no consensus even today. Biosemiotics recognizes that the philosophical matter-mind problem extends downward to the pattern recognition and control processes of the simplest living organisms where it can more easily be addressed as a scientific problem. In fact, how material structures serve as signals, instructions, and controls is inseparable from the problem of the origin and evolution of life. Biosemiotics was established as a necessary complement to the physical-chemical reductionist approach to life that cannot make this crucial categorical distinction necessary for describing semantic information. Matter as described by physics and chemistry has no intrinsic function or semantics. By contrast, biosemiotics recognizes that life begins with function and semantics.

Biosemiotics recognizes this matter-symbol problem at all levels of life from natural languages down to the DNA. Cartesian dualism was one classical attempt to address this problem, but while this ontological dualism makes a clear distinction between mind and matter, it consigns the relation between them to metaphysical obscurity. Largely because of our knowledge of the physical details of genetic control, symbol manipulation, and brain function these two categories today appear only as an epistemological necessity, but a necessity that still needs a coherent explanation. Even in the most detailed physical description of matter there is no hint of any function or meaning.

The problem also poses an apparent paradox: All signs, symbols, and codes, all languages including formal mathematics are embodied as material physical structures and therefore must obey all the inexorable laws of physics. At the same time, the symbol vehicles like the bases in DNA, voltages representing bits in a computer, the text on this page, and the neuron firings in the brain do not appear to be limited by, or clearly related to, the very laws they must obey. Even the mathematical symbols that express these inexorable physical laws seem to be entirely free of these same laws. — Physics and Metaphysics of Biosemiology, Howard Pattee

This is a far cry, however, from describing the brain as 'matter in motion'.

But here, you're singling out one layer in this complex and dynamic whole, and claiming that 'everything' is derived from that layer. That is, after all, exactly what reductionism does - it reduces (or tries to reduce) consciousness, intentionality, rational inference, and so on, to the level of the so-called 'hard sciences', where absolute certainty is thought to be obtainable, where everything can be made subject to so-called 'scientific method'. I'm not going to try and give a detailed account of what I think it wrong with that, other than registering it here. — Wayfarer

Thank you for that. I respectfully hold a different point-of-view on the matter (pun intended).

"Reduce" is a funny word. I rather think of the functioning of the brain as a grand, astonishing, glorious, stupendous culmination of the evolutionary process. I am blown away when I think of it, as much as I am blown away when I gaze upon a star-studded night sky. I sense the bigness of it all, not the smallness. I can affirm the reverence that should be accorded life, even while understanding its source.

And - what do you mean? Reduced from what? The notion that there is something else - something more - accounting for our mental capacities - that human consciousness is a fundamental component of reality as opposed to a manifestation of natural processes, jerks humans out of all of nature, makes us something special that evidence and logic do not support. We are not "above and beyond" nature, but a part of it, just like everything else that exists. An anthropocentric understanding of consciousness to me is at best arrogant, and at worst narcissistic.

And - what do you mean? Reduced from what? The notion that there is something else - something more - accounting for our mental capacities - that human consciousness is a fundamental component of reality as opposed to a manifestation of natural processes, jerks humans out of all of nature, makes us something special that evidence and logic do not support. We are not "above and beyond" nature, but a part of it, just like everything else that exists. An anthropocentric understanding of consciousness to me is at best arrogant, and at worst narcissistic. — Questioner

When I criticise reductionism, I’m not denying biological continuity or evolution, neuroscientific correlation, or the legitimacy of physical explanations. I’m criticising a closure claim: the claim that first-person experience, meaning, and normativity are nothing over and above what can be captured in third-person physical description, such that once the latter is given, the former are thereby accounted for in principle. And that is the position you are maintaining.

This is why I returned to the passage from Leo Tolstoy that you quoted. When Tolstoy writes that “art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them,” the “feelings” he refers to are precisely what contemporary philosophy of mind discusses under the heading of qualia—the qualitative character of lived experience. (Incidentally I’m not claiming Tolstoy was doing philosophy of mind as such; I’m pointing out that what he calls “feelings” are what contemporary debates categorise as 'qualia'.)

Reductionism, in the relevant sense, claims that these qualities of experience are nothing but neurophysiological processes occurring in the brain and body, and that those processes fully account for the qualitative dimension of experience, such that nothing over and above the physical description is doing any explanatory work. Once the neural story is told, the experiential story is, in principle, complete. (This is, for instance, the philosophy of the late Daniel Dennett.)

What I am questioning is not whether neural processes are involved—clearly they are—but whether this “nothing-but” account is meaningful. The issue is whether a third-person account of causal mechanisms can exhaustively account for the first-person character of experience itself, rather than merely correlate with it. And I don't believe that, so far, you've recognised this distinction.

On Bitbol’s view (and others in the phenomenological tradition), it cannot be so reduced - not because consciousness is “outside nature,” but because the very intelligibility of physical description presupposes experiential and normative structures that are not themselves found in the empirical domain.

Let me go back to Edmund Husserl, who instigated modern phenomenology:

In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense—this would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effect—but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness’s foundational, disclosive role.

Now, I fully understand that if you're encountering this idea for the first time, then it might not be intuitively obvious. What you're arguing for is very much the accepted wisdom - science as the arbiter of reality and naturalism as the presumed epistemic framework. I think I understand it, but I dissent from it.

The internal combustion engine is well understood. The understanding of its workings were not the kind of thing I had in mind when I spoke of scientific theories. — Janus

You said "certainty is never obtained in the hard sciences." I would think that includes everything involved in the internal combustion engine. And it's true. Just because gravity works the way it does, and has every moment we are aware of, doesn't mean we have scientific proof that it will work that way tomorrow.

I think it is undeniably true that most of human life cannot be explained in terms of physics. On the other hand physics certainly seems to be the basis of chemistry and chemistry the basis of life and life the basis of consciousness, and even if this is so it still doesn't follow that emergent systems can necessarily be understood comprehensively in terms of the systems they emerge from. Try understanding poetry, art or music in terms of physics, or even biology, and see how far you get. — Janus

That's because those things, and most of human life, only exist because of consciousness. What emergent system that doesn't involve consciousness can't be explained in terms of physics?