Rebuttals of this type often take the form of claims that reduce racism down to the the level of "brains" or "neurons." This is a coherent claim, although it does entail reductivism in the aforementioned form — Count Timothy von Icarus

Not to mention abandonment of the concept of moral agency, but that kind of goes without saying, considering the rest of the argument. It's why eliminativists are always keen to advance the claim that we're moist robots or some such, notwithstanding that such a claim radically undercuts the credibility of one who makes it. After all, why believe anything a robot utters?

Freud's oceanic sensations generally refer to the 'feeling' some people have of eternity and oneness with all reality, amongst other descriptions. Perhaps a sense of the numinous to others. I've met plenty of physicalist atheists who claim to feel this very thing when in nature or listening to, let's say, Bach. Not sure it necessarily translates to belief in the supernormal. Personally I think people generally have an emotional need for whatever belief they hold and retro fit the reasoning for it by way of post hoc rationalisations.

As in the exact same way it produces sight, smell, taste, heart beat, blood circulation, etc. Literally just like that. — Garrett Travers

The brain is not the same thing as its products, then?

That's why when your brain stops working, you stop being conscious. Very straight forward, mainstream neuroscience.

What's the empirical difference between my temporarily ceasing to be conscious, and my mind temporarily ceasing to exist?

As in the exact same way it produces sight, smell, taste, heart beat, blood circulation, etc. — Garrett Travers

Does a brain 'produce' sight? A brain (in a body) might see. Isn't that more accurate?

Does a brain 'produce' smell? Only if you extract it and give it a sniff, it seems to me.

A brain causes a heartbeat, perhaps. The heart itself beats. I'm not sure any production is going on.

What exactly is the relationship between the functioning of a brain, and, say taste? Is taste nothing other than a brain functioning in a particular way, perhaps? Would you want to say that?

Is consciousness nothing other than a kind of brain function? Is that what you mean by 'produce'?

Abstractions generally have to be able to cause physical effects for a physicalist. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I've never been able to understand the basis of this claim that abstractions do not have any effect in the world. All a person has to do is open one's eyes and see all the artificial products around, to apprehend the fact that we cannot deny effect from abstractions. If we make such a denial, we end up with the proposition that chance occurrence is the cause of artificial things having the forms that they do. And of course that's just ridiculous.

This is a common, but I think unfair rebuttal. After all, if the eliminativist vis-á-vis abstractions (or qualia) is correct, we shouldn't expect them to be able to overcome this illusion. So if they continue to say they feel tired, or advocate against racism, etc. it is only because the illusion is so powerful, which is exactly what their theory predicts. Before enlightenment, chop wood carry water, after enlightenment, know that you necissarily must chop wood and carry water.


Right, there shouldn't be a need to reduce abstractions to claim they are physical. This was a major problem for me for a while. If someone challenged my non-reductive physicalism, I'd feel the need to claim that "x is actually an idea, so x is neurons," which of course is the type of reductionalist argument I wanted to avoid because I thought it had many serious flaws.

I realized the error one day when I started trying to explain supply curves as attitudes held by producers in an economy in terms of their brains. This makes no sense. A supply curve obtains as a complex interaction between many people, laws, enforcement agencies, the natural enviornment, disease, technological development, etc. It cannot be reduced to neurons. Doing so appears to also force you into a sort of linguistic nominalism, where people don't actually make propositions about things in the world, but about ideas about things in the world, or about words (e.g., Sellars).

However, I think the evidence for epistemological realism is quite strong, and so I definitely don't want to embrace the idea that abstractions are just words and connect to nothing. I also don't want to claim they are their neuronal correlates, because they also include references to non-human things, and making this claim will tell people you actually don't even know what is meant by "supply curve," since it necissarily includes things like the amount of a given metal left in operating mines.

Nevertheless, if I write something that gives you the shits, your pulse will accelerate slightly, your adrenals will uptick a little. But nothing physical would have passed between us.

I don't see how this holds. If we had you both hooked up to various types of neuroimaging devices we could see correlates of both the process of writing the text and the process of reading it. We could also predict, at the scale of neurological substructures, where in the brain activity would increase during those activities.

Communications via the internet are also understood fairly well. The entire process relies on physical theories, theories backed by significant observation.

To be sure, when you get down to small enough scales, it is unclear how language is produced, or how the electroweak force that carries your message through the internet does what we see it doing in the world, although the force is fairly well understood at the scale of transistors and fiberoptic cables relevant here. The problem of positing something extra here is, what does it help explain? And if those physical causes aren't responsible for those phenomena, why don't the phenomena of language and internet debates show up elsewhere in the world, in places where people and the internet are absent?

Part of what physics tells us is that information is protean, and it shouldn't be susprising that a code in the form of human language can be transmitted into other physical forms, especially given we have had written and spoken languages for millenia.

Thus people today stop at the laws of nature, treating them as something inviolable, just as God and Fate were treated in past ages.

I think it's understandable. Claims that don't cohere with existing knowledge should be the targets of extra scrutiny. Otherwise, you will end up with a hodge podge of contradictory claims and an incoherent science. If you accept a bad claim that is coherent with existing scientific laws, it will lead to some misunderstandings, maybe wasted research dollars, etc., but it can eventually be identified and removed.

If you let in a bunch of bad claims that violate your existing laws, you now need to rebuild the system. It becomes a web of caveats and uncertainty, making future research harder. The bar to entry should be higher, and if the phenomena is actually there, it should be able to meet this bar.

However, obviously this can go too far. Almost all paradigm shifting discoveries, by their very nature, end up upending scientific laws. Claims of woo could have been used to discourage plenty of essential theories, such as the idea that nature writes genetic traits in a language-like code, relativity, etc.

Numbers, grammatical rules, the principles of logic, scientific principles - none of these have a scientific explanation and cannot be meaningfully reduced to physical laws. They also can’t be meaningfully accounted for as products of evolution either without reducing them to biology,

This is a very interesting point I will return to when I have time. People absolutely do, with varying degrees of evidence, try to reduce logic to biology. The universe has laws that obey logic, so in turn, animals have a "logical sense," much like they have a sense of sight. Certainly some basic logical ability seems innate. Healthy human babies will register surprise when experimenters preform magic tricks in front of them that give illogical results.

However, this is a big claim made using a small amount of evidence.

I think the much larger issue here is how you can claim that science, as a system of methodologies for ensuring correct logical inference from empircle data, proves that logic comes from nature, when if logic did not obtain, we would have no reason to believe the findings of science.

This is circular. And while circularity is not always fatal (natural numbers, Liebnitz' Law, etc.) this seems like a particularly vicious circle.

Pragmatist approaches side step this circularity, but they do so by saying the best we can do is to assume that logic is posterior to the findings of science.

However, there are other issues here.

Why are the methods for proof in mathematics so different from the sciences?

Why do mechanical computing machines and electric computers get caught in endless loops due to seeming contradictions? Why is does the logical reversibility of an operation equate to entropic reversibility (there are some challenges to this)? Why does the law of information entropy, possible messages, turn out to be the same thing as physical entropy? There are a bunch of these. The whole reason quantum cryptography is so airtight is because listening in requires a contradiction, so it's not an uncommon claim that even if QM is totally replaced, the cryptographic methods will continue to hold.


reply="180 Proof;654143"]

These abstracts are, in fact, generated – via autopoiesis – in ecologies of (human) brains

This seems problematic as an explanation. I don't see any issue with the claim as it respects one instantiation of any of the abstractions WF mentioned, but I don't see how this can be anywhere near a full explanation.

Because is abstractions are actually just names for processes in the brain, or thoughts, it means propositions about abstractions would actually just be propositions about brain processes (thoughts or beliefs). This fact incurs a high metaphysical toll, especially as concerns predication.

For example: "Circles are shapes," seems like it has to be radically rewritten for it to have a truth value if circles and shapes are only existant as brain states.

This in turn deprives a wide array of useful syllogisms that use abstract scientific terms of their meaning. At its most expansive, the claim that language is existant only in brains, instead of being tied to a huge host of referents, reduces all propositions to claims about brain states. But then if our propositions are actually about brain states, then the claims of science that led us to believe that language is actually existant only as brain states turns out to only have been propositions about brain states themselves. O_o

Edit: I should note that the above problem is not a problem for physicalism, even reductive physicalism. It just can't be that language is an emergent phenomena of brains alone. If language is an emergent phenomena of relations between many things, including brains, but also the physical referents of language, then this problem doesn't emerge. It's also unclear if human language, insomuch as it is a code for storing and transmitting information, is unique. DNA had been around far longer than human beings, and represents a code that does many of the same things that language does.

The apple-image, the thought-apple, I ate in my nightdream or daydream last night or this afternoon, respectively, that I don't doubt you'll be glad to reduce to brain shocks and twitches. — ZzzoneiroCosm

I said extant. That's not extant, that's imagined.

I wonder if you've ever picked up Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents. The oceanic experience Freud describes in the opening pages - Freud writes that though he acknowledges the existence of the oceanic experience he has never himself had the experience. — ZzzoneiroCosm

And if he did, he was wrong. It didn't exist, he imagined it.

The former tend to feel there's something distinctly psychical about the physical world. The others are happy to reduce the world to the physical. — ZzzoneiroCosm

A reduction would require it to be something less complex than what you're describing. The symphony of 80 billion neurons across the most complex piece of multistructural matter to ever exist in the known universe, that of which is responsible for the generation of every piece of machinery and technology, every piece of music, every artwork, being reduced to delusions and imagination is, in fact, the reduction.

The brain is not the same thing as its products, then? — bert1

If sight, or "products" of the brain cannot be separated from the brain, then yes its "products" are an element of itself. The brain is responsible for both its production and regulation, the same goes for consciousness. Consciousness and sight are internal cognitive productions, and are internally and cognitively bound. They aren't products like a sandwhich would be, that's external.

What's the empirical difference between my temporarily ceasing to be conscious, and my mind temporarily ceasing to exist? — bert1

If you are merely unconscious, your brain is still functioning and regulating data and other functions of the body. Meaning, your mind still exists, but your consciousness does not.

Does a brain 'produce' sight? — bert1

Yes.

Does a brain 'produce' smell? — bert1

Yes.

A brain causes a heartbeat, perhaps. The heart itself beats. I'm not sure any production is going on. — bert1

The brain regulates it entirely. Nothing else to it. It beats because they brain tells it to.

Is consciousness nothing other than a kind of brain function? — bert1

That is, as far as is known in cognitive neuroscience, exactly correct. It is a production of all the structures of the brain operating in symphony.

extant — Garrett Travers

So by extant you mean physical. So you're asking us to show you some physical thing that isn't physical.

A reduction would require it to be something less complex than what you're describing. The symphony of 80 billion neurons across the most complex piece of multistructural matter to ever exist in the known universe, that of which is responsible for the generation of every piece of machinery and technology, every piece of music, every artwork, being reduced to delusions and imagination is, in fact, the reduction. — Garrett Travers

It isn't a reductionism because nothing is excluded. You've misunderstood. Nothing you mentioned is excluded. Whereas you're committed to excluding some X in your picture of the universe. That's why it's a reductionism.

So by extant you mean physical. So you're asking us to show you some physical thing that isn't physical. — ZzzoneiroCosm

That is exactly correct, you've discovered it. Bravo, you're the first. To make the case that reality is not material, or that it even has non-material dimensions, you will have demonstrate the existence of something that is non-material. Otherwise, you will have to concede that such a proposition is predicated on thought, rather than on induction. In which case, I would shake your hand and say "more power to you, brother."

It isn't a reductionism because nothing is excluded. You've misunderstood. Nothing you mentioned is excluded. Whereas you're committed to excluding some X in your picture of the universe. That's why it's a reductionism. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Nope. Not what that means:

reductionism: the practice of analyzing and describing a complex phenomenon in terms of phenomena that are held to represent a simpler or more fundamental level, especially when this is said to provide a sufficient explanation.

This is precisely what you have done. You have relegated the most complex system in the known universe to some sort of imaginative substance that has no basis in the distinctly physical reality that gave rise to it. Has nothing to do with exclusions.

There is nothing true about this statement whatsoever. You have been dispensed with, guy. Move on. — Garrett Travers

"Many physicists have uncritically adopted platonic realism as their personal interpretation of the meaning of physics."

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-are-philosophers-too/

This follows from the trend of mathematicians who employ platonic realism in their axioms, to describe mathematical values as mathematical objects.

This follows from the trend of mathematicians who employ platonic realism in their axioms, to describe mathematical values as mathematical objects. — Metaphysician Undercover

From your article:

"most physicists would agree with Krauss and Tyson that observation is the only reliable source of knowledge about the natural world."

"We will use platonism with a lower-case “p” here to refer to the belief that the objects within the models of theoretical physics constitute elements of reality, but these models are not based on pure thought, which is Platonism with a capital “P,"

"In order to test their models all physicists assume that the elements of these models correspond in some way to reality."

"It is data—not theory—that decides if a particular model corresponds in some way to reality. If the model fails to fit the data, then it certainly has no connection with reality. If it fits the data, then it likely has some connection."

In other words, this "platonism" of yours cannot be divorced from correspondence to the material world. You've misconstrued the article and, in doing so, have validated my position. Better luck next time. Now, let's move on.

The brain regulates it entirely. Nothing else to it. It beats because they brain tells it to.

This is incorrect. Heart cells will beat in culture, disconnected from the body, and they synchronize their beats if they touch. The sinoatrial node is the main player in mediating heart rate, but plenty of other factors outside the brain play a role (hormones, consumption of exogenous chemicals, etc.).

A wide array of biological functions take place outside the direct intervention of the brain. You might be interested in the enteric nervous system, the "brain of the gut," which coordinates digestion without much connection to the rest of the nervous system.

Other parts of the body also shape conscious experience. The endocrine system plays a huge role in emotion, the regulation of wakefulness, satiety, feeling like you need to take a leak, etc. As someone whose wife is about 9 months pregnant, I'd say you ignore the role of hormones in cognition at your own peril!

The body also appears to play a direct role in qualia. Research on people with severed spinal cords shows that people experience anxiety in less unpleasant ways when they are not receiving feedback from their body. This makes sense intuitively when you think about how people describe extreme anxiety: "butterflies in my stomach," "a pit in my throat," etc. When the neuronal correlates of given emotions are part of feedback loops that involve the rest of the body, it doesn't make sense to speak of the emotion happening only in the brain.

There is, as a I mentioned earlier in this thread, a recurring type of article in neuroscience: the article bemoaning "crypto dualism." These authors argue that neuroscientists are doing a huge disservice to people when they use phrases like "your brain," in their papers. References to "a person's brain," is misleading they claim, because people are their brains.

This whole argument is wrong on two fronts. First, people aren't just their brains. They are the process of interaction between their brains, their bodies, and their environments. The truncation is artificial. Just as ignoring the body makes you lose part of the story, so too does ignoring the environment. In a person is the sum total of their experiences, thoughts, and actions, how can these be isolated from the environment? Nothing happens in a vacuum.

The problem becomes more acute when you look at it from the standpoint of adjacent fields. In social psychology, you have a core doctrine called "the fundamental attribution error." This is the tendency of people to over-emphasize explanations of behavior that rely on traits specific to the person acting (e.g., personality, genes, sex, etc.) instead of situational explanations of behavior.

What social psychology has generally found is that setting influences behavior to a large degree. Given the proper manipulation of the setting of an experiment, you can get all sorts of behaviors out of people. They will say a line that is clearly shorter than another is actually longer if enough other people have already verbally agreed that the short line is the longer of the two. You can get someone to turn around and face the corner of an elevator for no reason.

In these cases, the behavior, which is a core component of what a person is, gets driven by emergent social pressures. To be sure, things happening in the brain are involved in the behavior, but the behavior appears to be driven mostly by the situation. People who vary quite a bit in genetics, hormone levels, intelligence, etc., that is, people with a good deal of variance in the areas of the brain that drive behavior, nonetheless can be guided to behave in mostly identical ways with the right situational set up.

So, "you are your brain misses" that part, you are more than your brain. You are also less than your brain. "You are your brain" also misses that conscious awareness contains an order of magnitude less information than the brain. You have limited attention, and you have to direct your attention to get information into conscious awareness. The amount of information processed by the human brain is around 38 petaflops, 38,000 trillion operations per second. The amount of information in conscious awareness (harder to define or measure), is generally measured in mere bits, and not even very many bits. Short term memory is particularly lacking, with a storage capacity of 5-10 symbols.

The readers of articles "being their brains" has some difficulty with this. When you tell someone that their brain is doing X or Y, it certainly is the case that the parts of the person you're getting through to are not identical with their entire brain.

Great post.

This is incorrect. Heart cells will beat in culture, disconnected from the body, and they synchronize their beats if they touch. You may be interested the sinoatrial node is the main player in mediating heart rate, but plenty of other factors outside the brain play a role (hormones, consumption of exogenous chemicals, etc.). — Count Timothy von Icarus

These are individual parts of the body, all of which is dependent on the regulation provided by the brain. No, the heart does not beat without the brain, even if other chemcial mechanisms go into the operation. You're simply incorrect: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2015.0181

A wide array of biological functions take place outside the direct intervention of the brain. You might be interested in the enteric nervous system, the "brain of the gut," which coordinates digestion without much connection to the rest of the nervous system. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Nope. This phenomenon is directly the result of millions of neurons that are regulated by.... Guess what?: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19864724/

Other parts of the body also shape conscious experience. The endocrine system plays a huge role in emotion, the regulation of wakefulness, satiety, feeling like you need to take a leak, etc. As someone whose wife is about 9 months pregnant, I'd say you ignore the role of hormones in cognition at your own peril! — Count Timothy von Icarus

This field is called neuroendocrinology, and you are once again, not correct. The endocrine system and the brain work together. There is no endocrine systemwithout the glands of the brain that produce and regulate the neurotransmitters that allow for its operation : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6240150/

Everything else in your post does not contend with my position.

Great post. — RogueAI

All incorrect, or irrelevant. See articles I posted for more information.

demonstrate the existence of something that is non-material. — Garrett Travers

Thoughts (apple-image, apple-thought) exist, no matter what you say. Your reductionism excludes them.

If you say they don't exist you've just decided to define the word existence in terms of the physical.

Thoughts (apple-image, apple-thought) exist, no matter what you say. Your reductionism excludes them. — ZzzoneiroCosm

No, my accurate description of the complex reality in question includes them as projections of a real brain that can produce abstractions from real data it receives from reality. Again, it is not me reducing anything, I already demonstrated that. It is you reducing this complex reality to being tantamount to imagination.

If you say they don't exist you've just decided to define the word existence in terms of the physical. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Again, I'm only using the current definition:

existence - the fact or state of living or having objective reality.

It's you who are trying to redifine words here, just like you tried to with reductionism. That doesn't work on me. Either we speak the same language, or we play make believe. Your choice.

The brain regulates it entirely. Nothing else to it. It beats because they brain tells it to.

.

I was responding to this. There are "other things to it." A diagram showing a one way arrow from the brain to the heart is not an accurate picture of how the circulatory system works. Note, I did not write "the brain does not control heart rate," I said "plenty of other factors outside the brain," work to control heart rate.

"Heart cells" beat without the brain is what I said, not "the heart beats without the brain." And it is neat, you can watch it on YouTube.

These are individual parts of the body, all of which is dependent on the regulation provided by the brain.

Correct. I didn't write anything to the contrary. It is, however, also true that the brain is an individual part of the body that is regulated by, and dependant on other parts of the body.

So for example, I said the ENS has a great deal of autonomy, not that it is autonomous. You shouldn't write off interest in the ENS as simply a series of wires for commands from the brain. It has helped us find out a lot about how the brain works and is an area neglected by neuroscience until more recently.

Nevertheless, if I write something that gives you the shits, your pulse will accelerate slightly, your adrenals will uptick a little. But nothing physical would have passed between us.

I don't see how this holds. If we had you both hooked up to various types of neuroimaging devices we could see correlates of both the process of writing the text and the process of reading it. We could also predict, at the scale of neurological substructures, where in the brain activity would increase during those activities. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Of course. But at the centre of those reactions, is interpretation - what the sentence means. Animals react to threats or other stimuli, but we alone interpret the meaning of words. I'm distinguishing that from a physical influence, like a physical blow to the head, or the ingestion of a drug or other substance. That is one of the principles of psychosomatic medicine. If you say, well the mind just is the brain, then you're not able to make this distinction - according to that view, the placebo effect ought not to exist.

Again, I'm only using the current definition:

existence - the fact or state of living or having objective reality. — Garrett Travers

Source, please.

Again, I'm only using the current definition:

existence - the fact or state of living or having objective reality. — Garrett Travers

Your definition conveniently reduces existence to exactly what you want it to be. Odd.

Try this one.

ex·​is·​tence | \ ig-ˈzi-stən(t)s \
Definition of existence
1a: the state or fact of having being especially independently of human consciousness and as contrasted with nonexistence
the existence of other worlds
b: the manner of being that is common to every mode of being
c: being with respect to a limiting condition or under a particular aspect
2: actual or present occurrence
existence of a state of war
3a(1): the totality of existent things
(2): a particular being
all the fair existences of heaven
— John Keats
b: sentient or living being : LIFE
c: reality as presented in experience
dobsolete : reality as opposed to appearance


Merriam Webster online

F=ma is a concept that humans generated to understand how to properly categorize it as a pattern. — Garrett Travers

So, before humans existed, force did not equal mass times acceleration? This is something that only exists when it is recognised by humans?

existence - the fact or state of living or having objective reality. — Garrett Travers

Objects are only strictly defineable in relation to subjects. What humans consider objects, is conditioned by the kind of creatures that they are.

Furthermore, science itself depends in rational abstractions, mathematics and also all kinds of hypothetical entities and forces. Do numbers exist? If so, in what sense, and why does mathematics work so brilliantly?

Furthermore, scientists can't claim to know that the universe is material, as the nature of matter itself is unknown. This is not an 'argument from ignorance', it is an argument against the claim that science 'knows' or 'proves' that the universe is material in nature, as the nature of matter is not understood, and science relies on rational abstractions and models which are themselves not physical.

Physicalism...is the claim that the entire world may be described and explained using the laws of nature, in other words, that all phenomena are natural phenomena. This leaves open the question of what is 'natural' (in physicalism 'natural' means procedural, causally coherent or all effects have particular causes regardless of human knowledge [like physics] and interpretation and it also means 'ontological reality' and not just a hypothesis or a calculational technique), but one common understanding of the claim is that everything in the world is ultimately explicable in the terms of physics. This is known as reductive physicalism. However, this type of physicalism in its turn leaves open the question of what we are to consider as the proper terms of physics. There seem to be two options here, and these options form the horns of Hempel's dilemma, because neither seems satisfactory.

On the one hand, we may define the physical as whatever is currently explained by our best physical theories, e.g., quantum mechanics, general relativity. Though many would find this definition unsatisfactory, some would accept that we have at least a general understanding of the physical based on these theories, and can use them to assess what is physical and what is not. And therein lies the rub, as a worked-out explanation of mentality currently lies outside the scope of such theories.

On the other hand, if we say that some future, "ideal" physics is what is meant, then the claim is empty, for we have no idea of what this means. The "ideal" physics may even come to define what we think of as mental as part of the physical world. In effect, physicalism by this second account becomes the circular claim that all phenomena are explicable in terms of physics because physics properly defined is whatever explains all phenomena. — Wiki

In other words, 'physical' means whatever you need it to mean, to support your argument. And nothing more.

Whenever you realize that such givings are a miscalculation between your nature and the universe, you will understand completely. Besides, the only way for us to master reality and learn its secrets, is to first obey its inviolable laws. Functions and meaning in the human sense will be revealed in time, as so much already has. A lack of explanation means only an absence of knowledge, that does not mean something extraordinary. Especially when one considers that the entire body of data of all fields of science indicate a material universe, an objective reality. To prove me wrong, all you have to do is present a single shred of evidence to the contrary — Garrett Travers

Physics itself has demolished the idea that there is an objective reality, same for all observers. A couple of years ago, there was a flurry of articles on just this point, science disproves that there is an objective reality. No doubt you will try and bluster it away, but the facts remain.

projections — Garrett Travers

Are projections physical?

just like you tried to with reductionism. — Garrett Travers

Reductionism

There are multiple versions of reductionism.[2] In the context of physicalism, the reductions referred to are of a "linguistic" nature, allowing discussions of, say, mental phenomena to be translated into discussions of physics. In one formulation, every concept is analysed in terms of a physical concept.


From the wiki page on physicalism.