what account of the world do you give when talking to an average person with some philosophical interest? — Tom Storm

I'll give a physical account where it is appropriate; but not if they are asking about why folk stop at red traffic lights.

Edit: Oh, and Hempel's paradox is different to Hempel's dilemma.

:lol: Of course you're now providing an opening for the ersatz mystics and fundamentalists. If physicalism can't account for our entire experince, this gap can immediately be plugged with magic or gods. :razz:

Albino ravens are apparently a thing. — Janus

Worth a mint too I imagine. I think I prefer albino blues guitarists.

All the advances in science are consistent with idealism. — RogueAI

What do you mean by "idealism – which flavor of it?" Why does this "consistency" with "advances in science" matter?

Science doesn't do metaphysics.

"Science doesn't do" poetry or sports either, so what's your point, Rogue? And how are "all the advances in science", as you say, "consistent" with a metaphysics like "idealism" if "science doesn't do metaphysics"?

If you are a physicalist, what convinced you? — frank

To paraphrase W. Churchill:

IME I've found that physicalism is the worst methological paradigm for explaining – modeling – aspects of the natural world except for all those other non-physical or anti-physical paradigms tried from time to time.

Worth a mint too I imagine. I think I prefer albino blues guitarists. — Tom Storm

The latter are probably even rarer than albino ravens, so they should be worth even more than a mint.

Is the OP question regarding the metaphysical/ ontological or the epistemological notion of physicalism?

Naughty boy...paraphrasing war criminals!

Of course you're now providing an opening for the ersatz mystics and fundamentalists. If physicalism can't account for our entire experince than this gap can immediately be plugged with magic or gods — Tom Storm

:yikes:

So the only choice is between the irrationalism of physicalism and the irrationalism of mysticism and fundamentalists?

i don't think so.

I'm late seeing this but I'll give you my best argument for physicalism (or first attempt). We start from our mental worlds because that's the mode of our brain function. So for me the idea that the physical world is primary is an assumption, not a proven fact at least not on the first attempt. Also, if you assume the world is physical and everything is based on physical matter then you do have the problem of how do 'non-physicals' exist. For me that is the logic problem at the heart of philosophy. Is it monism or dualism?

Well, we shouldn't just take a guess, so where to start? Okay, assuming physical matter really exists then non-physicals should definitely not exist. Non-physicals are by definition non-existent. That's logical right? But we deal with non-physicals all the time in our mental worlds.
Zero, the past, the future, numbers, theories, ideas, words ....and once you see the pattern in all the easy things you can arrive at the conclusion that all mental content is non-physical. But the thing is it's based on physical brain state. A brain is always present, in physical location and physical time, when this perception of non-physicals is occuring so that is the basis of claiming (the ability to deal with non-physicals is a special ability of our biological brains). The logic is we see the components coming together in a physical way that makes the non-physical a tenable proposition. As opposed to a logical impossibility a paragraph ago.

So back to the argument of does physical matter exist. Now you have the logical conclusion that physical matter must exist because the mental worlds we experience could not exist without a physical basis.

So to call it monism or dualism is a linguistics problem that should be postponed until you understand these relations.

I would say all is physically based but our brains have this ability to deal in the non-physical realm.

There is an extremely good application of this principal in the field psychology and psychiatry in solving psychosis and schizophrenia (not endorsing the terminology, it's archaic). The assumption has been these condition are biologically based (strict physicalism) but the evidence points strongly to non-physical mental content driving these unfortunate conditions which are then treated with forced medication.

Or here in Minnesota, forced enrollment in clinical drug trials for the pharma industry leading to the suicide of the patient. No small matter but nowhere near the end of the problems of getting it wrong.

So the only choice is between the irrationalism of physicalism and the irrationalism of mysticism and fundamentalists? — Banno

It was a joke. A summary of what we often seem to find in these threads... Hence the :razz: emoji.

My toaster popped, so I missed the emoji.

See 's considered post. So many different ideas that need to be teased out in order to make sense of what is going on. The result is often confusion.

IME I've found that physicalism is the worst methological paradigm for explaining – modeling – aspects of the natural world except for all those other non-physical or anti-physical paradigms tried from time to time. — 180 Proof

Here's a thought: why not use different sorts of explanations for different things.

There's a hidden assumption that there can be only one sort of explanation. An epistemic monism.

the evidence points strongly to non-physical mental content driving these unfortunate conditions — Mark Nyquist

Can you provide some references or details for this?

Here's a thought: why not use different sorts of explanations for different things. — Banno

:up:

This is why I say 'aspects of nature' and not 'everything'. Epistemological pluralism (e.g. N. Goodman's irrealism) makes the most sense to me.

I thought as much.

What will be fun to watch here is the pragmatists who will insist on there being only one explanation.

The most annoying thing here, and one that I doubt will be addressed, is the knowledge argument, since it uses qualia, which I dislike, to show that mind is not (just) physical, which I do like.

And this is where I find myself in some agreement with @Wayfarer.

I was referring to the Dan Markingson case at the University of Minnesota.

All the symptoms that were reported publicly are consistent with mental content driving his condition. For example he self reported hundreds of coded messages and a specific reference I remember from the court records was an unusual reaction to seeing an unusually shaped carpet stain in his California apartment.

That is just some of the symptoms I can recall.
My impression was it was a case of runaway mental content without an ability to recover on his own.

And this is where I find myself in some agreement with Wayfarer. — Banno

:gasp:

:gasp: — 180 Proof

Yeah, I know.

Also his mom was actually using a false identity on the internet to contact him so he may have had some basis for suspicion or paranoia. My impression was it was an unusual series of events he was reacting to, the best he could.

the truth compels us! :rage:

That SEP article also contains a section on the argument from abstract objects, which is also a killer argument in my view.

And

Brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, the motion of water molecules, electrical current, and any other physical phenomenon you can think of, seem clearly devoid of any inherent meaning. By themselves they are simply meaningless patterns of electrochemical activity. Yet our thoughts do have inherent meaning – that’s how they are able to impart it to otherwise meaningless ink marks, sound waves, etc. In that case, though, it seems that our thoughts cannot possibly be identified with any physical processes in the brain. In short: Thoughts and the like possess inherent meaning or intentionality; brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, and the like, are utterly devoid of any inherent meaning or intentionality; so thoughts and the like cannot possibly be identified with brain processes. — Ed Feser

abstract objects — Wayfarer

Ok. I think it mush the same as the intentionality argument, actually. Numbers and abstracta are something we do. Bits of grammar. Otherwise, Plato was right, and nobody wants that.

Otherwise, Plato was right, and nobody wants that. — Banno

That made me laugh.

Consider me as one of those physicalists that won’t deny that the world might contain, as you say, many items that at first glance don’t seem physical.

Can I be a metaphysical physicalist? At least until convinced I can’t be? — Mww

So it's just the grounding for your worldview, right? You don't need an argument for it. — frank

I agree with Mww, but add that it's grounded by the fact that (IMO) physicalism is an inference to the best explanation for the known facts of the world. Most every aspect of the world is physical, the one possible exception being the hard problem of consciousness (which actually can be accounted for, but depends on a bit of hand-waving). But alternative metaphysical theories depend on more ad hoc assumptions.

What about logical necessity? How is that 'necessitated by the physical'? — Wayfarer

Truthmaker theory (as explicated by David Armstrong, the patron saint of Physicalism) provides a grounding for logic.

If we define "physical" as what is currently understood by physics, the dilemma arises because our current understanding of physics is likely incomplete and may change in the future. As a result, the claim that the mind (for example) is 'physical' might be false simply because our current physics does not fully capture all physical aspects of the universe. And If we define "physical" as whatever a future, complete physics will include, the dilemma arises because this definition is too vague and open-ended. We cannot currently know what the future physics will encompass, making it difficult to make meaningful claims about the mind being physical based on this definition. — Wayfarer

A physicalist metaphysics is not dependent on what is known, or will be known. It is based on the axiom that everything that exists is physical. Physicalists accept this axiom because it is indeed all that's needed to account for everything known to exist - i.e. it's the most parsimonious ontology.

I think it is Jaegwon Kim who forwards the argument against non-reductive physicalism. This argument can be picked-up by reductive physicalists who maintain that causal closure and causal exclusion prohibit non-physical mental events (or at least these principles render non-physical mental events casually inefficacious). This seems to me like a strong argument for physicalism. I myself am not an adherent to physicalism because I believe in supernatural explanations in addition to physical explanations.

…..just the grounding for your worldview, right?
— frank

I agree with Mww, but add that it's grounded by the fact that (IMO) physicalism is an inference to the best explanation for the known facts of the world. — Relativist

Inference to a best explanation is nothing if not a metaphysical process, right?

Seems like this could just as well be an argument against reductionism/smallism, rather than an argument against physicalism per se.


I'm not sure if that solves the issue though. If we're physical, how can we "do" things that none of our more basic, better understood physical components can do? The problem does not seem like it can be waved away with weak emergence, so it leaves us with either a non-physical mind, or strongly emergent conciousness.

Arguably, strong emergence might also be fatal to physicalism, at least as it is commonly framed. That would make the mental physical, and not through some sort of superveniance relation, but rather because the mental is a fundemental, irreducible, aspect of the physical. It would make all the arguments about the causal closure principle moot, because it would turn out that mental events have causal powers, full stop, and there is no possible translation of them into non-mental processes.

My suspicion is that this is why panpsychism doesn't seem to sit well with physicalism, even though physicalism doesn't seem to necessarily preclude panpsychism. If you have panpsychism, then causal closure also seems irrelevant, unless you tack on epiphenomenalism.

But, this would need proof of existence before it became anything more than speculation.

Well, that's what people believe they are demonstrating in their papers. In any event, the converse isn't decisively demonstrated.

Anyhow, spacetime is not mass energy. But if all physical reality did reduce to one thing, spacetime a metric field within a field of fields, the would also be a problem for physicalism. If there is only one thing that everything reduces to, then the concept of substance that physicalism emerged from ceases to do any explanatory lifting at all. Everything is explained by process within the monosubstance. It's unclear how, given a single undifferentiated process that produces mental life and everything else, allows idealism vs physicalism to be a useful distinction. The monosubstance being mental (idealism) or physical doesn't seem to make any difference, the label would lack content.

Physicalists accept this axiom because it is indeed all that's needed to account for everything known to exist - i.e. it's the most parsimonious ontology.

This is exactly what idealists claim, in favor of their own position. No one has ever observed the noumena, it's impossible. Every empirical observation ever has been phenomenal. No one has ever had an experience outside of subjective first person experience. Not one datumn has informed a scientific paper anywhere that wasn't experienced in the mind.

Thus, everything is mental. This is equally parsimonious, perhaps more because it doesn't need to explain why there seems to be a different sorts of stuff, mental life and physical stuff. Science, so the claim goes, is our empirical study of how mental stuff, phenomena, works. Nothing that is not mental has ever been observed. Claiming otherwise would be to claim that one has perceived something without their mind, seen without their vision, yadda, yadda, yadda.

I don't see how that position is anymore ad hoc. All the evidence that is used to support the claim that "everything that has been discovered to date is physical," could equally be used to support the claim that "everything discovered to date has been mental." What such evidence actually amounts to seems to be more a refutation of dualism than support for either position.

But the fact that such evidence can't decide the issue makes me question how useful the distinction is in the first place.

I'm not sure if that solves the issue though. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'm not sure to which "issue" you refer.

If we're physical, how can we "do" things that none of our more basic, better understood physical components can do? — Count Timothy von Icarus

So, by way of an instance, we can count, but there is no purely physical explanation of how or what counting is. hence physical explanations are useless here. Hence there are things that are not explained by physics. Some claim that somehow counting emerges from the physics of the brain, but it remains that so far no account can be found of how this happens, still less how it is that this counting enables international credit ratings and so on.

My suspicion is that panpsychism is bunk, and that somehow counting is the result of physical interactions. But I don't know how, and I do not have to take a stance on this.

smallism — Count Timothy von Icarus

Hey a new word. Don’t much like it, but that might just be my holism.

Sorry, I think I was misreading you. I was thinking counting being something we "do" was somehow supposed to resolve what I see as the crux Wayfarer's quote, re the physical nature of the mind, not the status of abstract objects. Abstraction being something we do makes a lot of sense to me.

The proliferation of types of abstract objects has always made me skeptical of them.

I think I was misreading you. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Ok.

What is passed off as physics around here is dreadful. But not quite as bad as what is supposed dot pass for philosophical insight. I'll agree with you that idealism vs physicalism fails to be a useful distinction.

It doesn't seem as though any reductive physical explanation could account for the obvious semantic/ semiotic aspects of things. It doesn't follow that the latter is non-physical, it's just that purely mechanistic explanations cannot cut it when it comes to signification, reference and meaning.

Mechanistic explanations are digital and deterministic, whereas it seems that reality, the physical, is most plausibly analogue and non-deterministic.