Yes. And to address the causal exclusion/overdetermination argument head-on, causation is contextual; there isn't some objective matter of fact about what causes what. Mental causation is in no way in competition with e.g. neurophysical causation because in each case causation is situated within an independent, self-contained explanatory scheme. Only other factors within the same explanatory context are relevant to it. — SophistiCat
Post-Nietzscheans would argue that autopeiotic processes of life are not reducible to physics, at least not without a re-envisioning of physics in a direction suggested by Prigogine and Stengers. — Joshs
that any ideas about the existence of minds or about the existence of ‘selves’ that ‘possess’ minds are false, and are based on illusion. — Janus
Here is one nice example: Suppose a pigeon has been trained to peck on red objects and, thereafter, the pigeon is presented with a crimson object and pecks at it. The cause of the pecking behavior, one might say, is the 'event' that consist in the presentation of the specific crimson object. But the pigeon would still have pecked at the object if it had been scarlet, say. So, the antecedent event only can be said to be causative and explanatory of the effect when individuated with reference to the contrastive class 'non-red' rather than 'non-crimson'. And the same can be said of the contrastive character of the effect. — Pierre-Normand
Nothing physical has changed - only your belief. — Wayfarer
I mean you are evoking the subject and it's consciousness, which on the eliminativist perspective are both illusory, so that obviously won't do. — Janus
you need not appeal to such exotic examples as the placebo effect. — SophistiCat
I mean you are evoking the subject and it's consciousness, which on the eliminativist perspective are both illusory, so that obviously won't do. [...] My intuitive sense is that eliminativism is wrong, but I can't see how it, or for that matter, any other metaphysical view, can be definitively proven to be wrong. — Janus
And what I’m saying is that the assertion that consciousness could be ‘an illusion’ implies a conscious subject - one who is subject to the illusion. There can’t be an illusion without a subject of experience, as an illusion is misunderstood experience. — Wayfarer
But thinking of illusions in terms of "first person points of view" is already to assume that first person points of view are not themselves illusions. — Janus
For a first person point of view cannot be illusory to the same first person point of view. And a first person point of view is not in any sense of the term a physical object. — javra
What we think of as 'the subject of experience', the "one who is subject to the illusion", could simply be the physical body. — Janus
I would love to find a convincing argument against (eliminative) physicalism, that relied upon no tendentious presuppositions, to support my intuition that it is wrong. — Janus
The perceptual process and the resulting understanding would themselves be physical processes: pressure waves in the air, photons, or tactile stimuli, etc stimulate our nerve receptors, and set up a cascade of events within our central nervous system. The information stating whether the treatment is a placebo or not is physically encoded in some manner, either in a particular sequence of squiggles on a page, or in a particular pattern of pressure waves in the air, or a particular arrangement of Braille, or whatever.Yes, but what changed the physical state? What was the causal factor? It was a change in the understanding, in the perception. That is why it can be described as a 'top-down' causal sequence. Whereas if the mental was indeed supervenient on the physical, then this ought not to happen. You might expect that a pill would change perception - that is 'bottom-up' - but you wouldn't expect that a change in perception would have physiological consequences. — Wayfarer
I don't know if quarks are fundamental particles - I don't know enough about particle physics. Electrons, for instance, are taken to be fundamental particles, though.But aren't you saying that 'the quark' is 'the fundamental unit'? It therefore serves in the role previously assigned to 'the atom' i.e. the purported 'fundamental particle of matter'. Whereas, whether a quark, or indeed any of the denizens of the 'particle zoo', actually are 'particles' is, I think, an open question.
//ps// This question is addressed by Victor Stenger in Particles are for Real, one of the last things he wrote.
Likewise, with a fine-grained enough brain scan, one could presumably "read off" the mental state of the perceiver from the physical state of his brain: particular physical states encode particular mental states, even if one can't "see" the mental states directly (indeed, this needn't even be taken to be a hypothetical fantasy relegated to a philosophical thought experiment: some very preliminary steps towards "mind-reading" ability using brain scanning technology have already been taken). — Arkady
Nothing in "encode" was meant to imply a causal relationship. The research demonstrates a primitive form of technological-based mind-reading, which is exactly what I claimed, and which none of your complaints negates. If you wish to move the goal posts, then that is none of my concern.The cited research is fascinating, but provides evidence of correlation between mental activity and neurophysiology, not of causation, hence; it is incorrect to say, "...particular physical states encode particular mental states" when the research makes no such claim. — Galuchat
The perceptual process and the resulting understanding would themselves be physical processes: pressure waves in the air, photons, or tactile stimuli, etc stimulate our nerve receptors, and set up a cascade of events within our central nervous system. — Arkady
Likewise, with a fine-grained enough brain scan, one could presumably "read off" the mental state of the perceiver from the physical state of his brain: — Arkady
I don't know enough about particle physics. Electrons, for instance, are taken to be fundamental particles, though. — Arkady
I take the statement ‘consciousness is a condition for illusion’ to be apodictic, for exactly the reasons identified by Descartes. — Wayfarer
If you cannot come up with a valid alternative to this proposition, “I, a first person point of view, am while aware (including of the thoughts I'm having which purport to present an alternative to my so being),” then it will surpass the certainty level of any other proposition to which there are rational alternatives, including that of eliminativism. — javra
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