Okay. Well, looks like Chomsky still hangs his quasi-mysterianism on antiquated 'folk psychological' hooks, so nothing philosophically significant for me to learn from his article. So much to read, so little time; intellectual triage is of paramount significance in my daily praxis.

So by agreeing with his contemporaries, Newton wasn't denying gravity. He was saying common sense was failing him and his generation, right?

Yes. Failing him and Hume, Locke, Priestley even, much later, Russell and many others.

Our common sense understanding doesn't reach into the depths of nature, but it was assumed to be true in some form, until it was proven false.

Now it may be easy for us to say "that's obvious", well, I don't share that. I don't think many of us (or any) would have come up with his equations and theory.

That the world doesn't make sense to us - in principle - was a big deal. But you still hear people talking about "materialism" and Newton's "mechanistic understanding" that was only disproven with QM.

That's the opposite of what happened, Newton overthrew materialism, and it has only gotten stranger since - further removed from common sense.

That's the opposite of what happened, Newton overthrew materialism, and it has only gotten stranger since - further removed from common sense. — Manuel

To further illustrate this point:

Strawson, on the other hand, describes panpsychism as a form of physicalism, on his view the only viable form.[26] Panpsychism can be combined with reductive materialism but cannot be combined with eliminative materialism because the latter denies the existence of the relevant mental attributes.[8] — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism#Physicalism_and_materialism

emphasis is mine

Now it may be easy for us to say "that's obvious", well, I don't share that. I don't think many of us (or any) would have come up with his equations and theory. — Manuel

It's still not obvious that the same thing that makes the moon go around the earth makes apples fall.

But what about relativity? Isn't it built on thought experiments that were later verified? At least some of our native reason works?

That is correct. Chomsky, in this and other articles, thinks that Strawson's construction of materialism is one of the few that makes sense, given the definition and the claims made by the philosophy.

Stoljar too, to a lesser extent.

But, Chomsky doesn't agree with Panpsychism, because he believes "radical emergence" to be part of normal science.

But, Chomsky doesn't agree with Panpsychism, because he believes "radical emergence" to be part of normal science. — Manuel

Maybe I'm not as well versed on this topic matter; still, I don't find a necessary conflict between the idea of panpsychism and the idea of radical emergence: e.g., even if panpsychism, there would yet be a radical enough emergence of life from nonlife. Any idea of why the two would need to be contradictory?

But what about relativity? Isn't it built on thought experiments that were later verified? At least some of our native reason works? — frank

Yeah. Einstein understood that Newton's laws could only go so far, it had problems it could not account for, such as the orbit or Mercury.

So Einstein's theory is better for many aspects of astronomy, including say, GPS. Though Newton's laws work pretty well for objects here on Earth.

But what about relativity? Isn't it built on thought experiments that were later verified? At least some of our native reason works? — frank

I'll add the following: It works quite well, true. As does QM. But because there are disparities between the two, we know that at least one of the two is not accurately representing what is - if not both.

:up:

Maybe I'm not as well versed on this topic matter; still, I don't find a necessary conflict between the idea of panpsychism and the idea of radical emergence: e.g., even if panpsychism, there would yet be a radical enough emergence of life from nonlife. Any idea of why the two would need to be contradictory? — javra

Strawson postulates panpsychism as necessary because emergence cannot be brute or "radical": there must be something in the phenomena by which new properties arise as they do (in this case consciousness or experience), otherwise it would be a miracle every time a new property arises in nature.

Since Strawson takes experience to be the most obvious physical fact of existence (Strawson's materialism makes him say that everything that exists is physical, he means everything), the basic building blocks of nature (he calls them "ultimates": maybe they are strings, or quantum fields, whatever they may be), must either constitute or realize experience.

There must be something, proto-experiential or experiential at bottom, or else experience is a miracle.

Chomsky takes the case that "radical emergence" is a common thing, such as when molecules combine to give rise to liquids. He says that liquid obviously emerges, but we don't know why. We have a theory for it, but we don't intuitively understand it.

So in the case of experience, Chomsky cites Priestley and says:

"Priestley rejects the conclusion that consciousness “cannot be annexed to the whole brain as a system, while the individual particles of which it consists are separately unconscious.” That “A certain
quantity of nervous system is necessary to such complex ideas and affections as belong to the human mind; and the idea of self, or the feeling that corresponds to the pronoun I,” he argues, “is not essentially different from other complex ideas, that of our country for example.”

p. 193

So there is something about physical stuff that leads, in very specific configurations, to experience, but we don't know what it is. Strawson thinks there's experience at bottom.

Strawson postulates panpsychism as necessary because emergence cannot be brute or "radical": there must be something in the phenomena by which new properties arise as they do (in this case consciousness or experience), otherwise it would be a miracle every time a new property arises in nature. [...] — Manuel

Awesome. Thank you much for the explanation. I guess I'll be needing to read into the physicalist version of panpsychism, then. This with primary interest in the dichotomy between life and nonlife, which to me still seems rather brute/radical in terms of evolutionary developments (here in the generalized sense of change over time).

I take this to be the crux of the matter:

Classical interpretations having vanished, the notions of body, material, physical are hardly more than honorific designations for what is more or less understood at some particular moment in time, with flexible boundaries and no guarantee that there will not be radical revisions ahead, even at its core.

We can speculate and argue about such things as dualism, the mind/body problem, and the "hard problem", but all such theorizing is based on shifting conceptual grounds.

Sure! If you are interested, I can see if I can find you an article - or a part of an article - in which Strawson talks about the problem of life in relation to panpsychism.

The gist of it was (if I remember correctly) that all of "life" could be explained by our physics, chemistry and biology, but this still does not touch on the topic of experience at all.



Very astute concision.

Sure! If you are interested, I can see if I can find you an article - or a part of an article - in which Strawson talks about the problem of life in relation to panpsychism. — Manuel

I am interested. Cheers.

The gist of it was (if I remember correctly) that all of "life" could be explained by our physics, chemistry and biology, but this still does not touch on the topic of experience at all. — Manuel

Right, I'd say. Nor does it yet seem to me to touch on the quantum leap, to so speak, between a bundle of inanimate molecules (like a bundle of individual lipids, proteins, and nucleic acids in a pastry dish) and the homeostatically metabolizing process operating on these otherwise inanimate constituents which is (sentience-endowed) corporeal life per se (tmk, even the most rudimentary bacterium can sense its environment and act/react accordingly).

https://www.sjsu.edu/people/anand.vaidya/courses/c2/s0/Realistic-Monism---Why-Physicalism-Entails-Panpsychism-Galen-Strawson.pdf

pp.20-24 is the part you'd be interested in, top 3rd of pp.20: "What about the emergence of life?"

To save you much terminological hassle: E means "experiential", NE means "non-experiential".

Experiential is basically consciousness.

Non-experiential is everything that doesn't have experience: a table, a rock, wood (maybe), dry paint, particles, etc.

The topic of the bacterium is very interesting, my intuition doesn't reach that far, but I could imagine a very elementary reaction that could be an extremely rudimentary experience.

:up: Thanks a bunch. I'll check it out.

Anyway, so Chomsky's sense of "understanding" – by extension explicability and therefore inexplicability (i.e. "mysterious, mystery") – is anachronistic and related to / derived from an out-dated, surpassed, methodological paradigm? – okay, got it. — 180 Proof

No, that's not his sense. What Newton believed isn't what Chomsky believes. The passage you cite is a description of what Newton meant. Chomsky is not advocating "understanding" in the sense of the mechanical philosophy, i.e., contact action. This is very clear, if one deigns to read.

I looked into it and the Kelvin quote seems to be misattributed and decontextualized. I agree with your larger point though.

https://www.quora.com/Which-19th-century-physicist-famously-said-that-all-that-remained-to-be-done-in-physics-was-compute-effects-to-another-decimal-place

:100:

:up: The wiki for Lord Kelvin with his "false pronuncements" is interesting though, more or less big whoppers on par with Aristotle's. Chomsky apparently suffers from the same idealist-rationalist projection bias: "ultimately, only what I know (or cogito) is real", etc.

Okay, as I've requested already, cite where Chomsky clearly states what he Chomsky means by "understanding" and "mystery" and where he soundly demonstrates how he/we can understand whatever it is he/we "will never understand". You kibbitz a lot, Xtrix, without staying on topic or addressing my explicit requests. Telling me to "read for yourself" misses the point a g a i n that I need to know whether or not Chomsky says anything new on this topic and, thereby, whether or not there's something new for me learn from him which makes reading the article worth my time. You don't know? You can't / won't help me with that? No problem, just reply to others' posts which interest you and stop wasting my time. :brow:

The wiki for Lord Kelvin with his "false pronuncements" is interesting though — 180 Proof

I just took a look, thanks

If you say General Relativity is more intuitive than mechanistic materialism, then we slightly differ in common sense understanding. — Manuel

Also

I've never said anything like this. Rather, I find the way the words "intuitive" & "mechanistic" as used by you to be irrelevant for the reasons me & have explained. The only reason why I mentioned General Relativity was Chomsky using the example of Newton & his contemporaries proclaiming the impossibility for any physical understanding of Action over a Distance. Both Mechanistic Philosophy and Newton were wrong, the former because it was always nonsense and the latter because of lack of foresight that we have now. It does not illuminate anything on how we should understand the scope of science today. Those are my last words on the subject.

You might be interested in this comment.

But what about relativity? Isn't it built on thought experiments that were later verified? At least some of our native reason works? — frank

Yeah. Einstein understood that Newton's laws could only go so far, it had problems it could not account for, such as the orbit or Mercury.

So Einstein's theory is better for many aspects of astronomy, including say, GPS. Though Newton's laws work pretty well for objects here on Earth. — Manuel

I think you are missing Frank's point. Einstein wasn't fiddling with Newtonian mechanics in an attempt to fix a discrepancy in the orbit of Mercury. It wasn't then thought of as a problem with Newtonian mechanics. Astronomers - quite reasonably - hoped to find a new celestial body that would account for the discrepancy. That GR would eventually solve the problem was entirely unforeseen.

The received view to which, I think, Frank was alluding is that, rather than searching for a best fit for some specific empirical observations, in developing his Special and General theories of relativity Einstein's thinking was motivated by very general philosophical intuitions, which he illustrated with his famous thought experiments. The result of which was a more thoroughgoing application of the principle of relativity (or general covariance) than the Galilean relativity that was at the heart of Newtonian physics. (But see John Norton's review General covariance and the foundations of general relativity: eight decades of dispute for a more nuanced analysis.)

@javra pointed out that though we may have high confidence in relativity based on our observations, there's still something wrong: relativity conflicts with QM around the "big bang."

So there may be a pending conceptual revolution. That's something we have to live with (those of us who can accept it, that is.)

Correct. That was poorly phrased, we can say that Newton's laws work on certain scales,

Einstein's "happiest thought" was essentially a thought experiment that helped him begin to develop a new theory, I doubt he had Newton is mind.

You might be interested in this comment. — Wayfarer

I don’t find anything disagreeable in the comment linked to. Thanks for it. I’m just struck by, I’ll call it the awkwardness, of physicalism being in this instance in part defined by the occurrence of awareness that is irreducible to nonawareness. Don’t know if you got a chance to visit the wiki page I linked to: though disagreements are many, turns out panpsychism as concept can nevertheless be deemed amiable to most any system of ontology, depending on who you ask. The only stringent exception being that of emergentism as it regards awareness per se. But when it comes to physicalism - irrespective of what future refinements, if any, might be made to the notion of “panpsychist physicalism”- it seem to completely evaporate the semantics by which physicalism is currently understood. For instance, taken from the first page of the manuscript @Manuel linked to:

What does physicalism involve? What is it, really, to be a physicalist? What is it to be a realistic physicalist, or, more simply, a real physicalist? Well, one thing is absolutely clear. You’re certainly not a realistic physicalist, you’re not a real physicalist, if you deny the existence of the phenomenon whose existence is more certain than the existence of anything else: experience, ‘consciousness’, conscious experience, ‘phenomenology’, experiential ‘what-it’s-likeness’, feeling, sensation, explicit conscious thought as we have it and know it at almost every waking moment. — Galen Strawson -- Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism

This statement, of itself, runs counter to what many a physicalist on this website tend to affirm.

Chomsky addresses the "hard problem" by saying it may eventually be abandoned rather than solved. I don't think that's out of step with Chalmers' opinion. Do you?

Chalmers' says a lot of things, but I wouldn't be surprised if he accepted this formulation.

It may be abandoned in terms of being called the "hard problem", much like gravity's (or motion more generally) non-mechanistic effects had to be accepted: we'll have to accept the fact that matter thinks, without knowing why.

That's not to say that gravity or consciousness aren't "hard problems", they are. On this view, there are many hard problems in science and human understanding more generally.

You kibbitz a lot, Xtrix, without staying on topic or addressing my explicit requests — 180 Proof

I, and others, have addressed your issues. But your requests are based on misunderstandings and arrogant presumptions.

cite where Chomsky clearly states what he Chomsky means by "understanding" and "mystery" and where he soundly demonstrates how he/we can understand whatever it is he/we "will never understand". — 180 Proof

Human beings have scope and limit in their cognitive capacities. That’s obvious. What was once thought as “understanding” — a mechanical view — is no longer the case. Ditto physical and material. This is the claim.

There are things we understand — within the scope of our cognitive abilities — and there are some things we don’t (and perhaps can’t) understand. He talks about rats and the prime number maze — that’s a mystery to them, just as will and the creative use of language is to us today.

If you’re looking for a technical definition of “understanding” or “mystery,” you’ve completely missed the point.

Again, best to start by reading the text rather than coming into a discussion with motivated reasoning, launching accusations which are demonstrably untrue.

t I need to know whether or not Chomsky says anything new on this topic — 180 Proof

It’s important to understand what the topic is first. If you’re unwilling to do this, that’s OK. But perhaps not waste others’ time on a thread you have no real interest in.

What part of

cite where Chomsky clearly states what he Chomsky means by "understanding" and "mystery" and where he soundly demonstrates how he/we can understand whatever it is he/we "will never understand". — 180 Proof

do you not understand, Xtrix? :roll: