There's an element of that, it's hard to think so otherwise, but even taking this to account, I don't see how this expands to objects being "disassociated boundaries", with people you could say that, but I don't see how this entails creates Kastrup's idealism. — Manuel

No, I don't see it as supporting Kastrup's idealism, however I can see how Kastrup's view could be an expression of his recognition of the distributed nature of evolving human understanding, in terms that make sense to him. I think Kastrup engages in magical thinking, but in an attempt to explain something real that he observes.

What aspect(s) are you still trying to understand?
— wonderer1

The whole thing. — frank

It seems to me that supervenience is all about existential dependency. As someone mentioned earlier, the difference between emergentists and non-emergentists may prove helpful.

It's pretty clear isn't it? Evolutionary biology replaced the Biblical creation mythology, but it also elbowed aside a great deal of philosophy which had become attached to it as part of the cultural milieu. So it seems obvious to anyone here that mind evolves as part of the same overall process through which everything else evolves. And it's then easy to take the step that the human mind is a product of evolutionary processes in just the same way as are claws and teeth. Easy! What could be wrong with that? (That's why I'm an advocate of 'the argument from reason', although it's about as popular on this forum as a parachute in a submarine.) — Wayfarer

Oh, no, I wouldn't say it's clear. It seems to me that there are materialisms, even though there's a theme that runs through them. So instead of evolutionary biology replacing Biblical mythology we could say that the industrial revolution enabled human beings to recognize economic relationships in all things be it the church, state, or work -- just to contrast the two materialisms that I'm thinking through here.

With respect to the mind-body problem what makes it unclear is what that reduction is between, I think. It's not only hard to specify the relationship, it's even hard to specify what the relationship is between. Further we have a temptation to rely upon our own experiences when thinking about minds, but this has been shown repeatedly to be false, so on top of the ambiguity there is our own weakness in thinking through difficult problems that makes it a little unclear, at least.

Though if the theme holds that might be the beginnings to some clarity.

It's pretty clear isn't it? Evolutionary biology replaced the Biblical creation mythology, but it also elbowed aside a great deal of philosophy which had become attached to it as part of the cultural milieu. So it seems obvious to anyone here that mind evolves as part of the same overall process through which everything else evolves. And it's then easy to take the step that the human mind is a product of evolutionary processes in just the same way as are claws and teeth. Easy! What could be wrong with that? (That's why I'm an advocate of 'the argument from reason', although it's about as popular on this forum as a parachute in a submarine.) — Wayfarer

It's a matter of facing the way things are in reality as compared to being in denial. Brains are a somewhat important aspect of our biology. Why would brains be any less shaped by evolution than other biological organs? So "What could be wrong with that?", aside from your dislike of the idea?

Do you have a scientific explanation as to why minds/brains would somehow be excluded from the effects of natural selection, sexual selection, etc?

I think that the only possible argument for physicalism has to start from a neutral monist metaphysical position, then argue that emergent psychological properties are real, in a strong sense. So mind is not denied but rather affirmed at the physical level.

But more than an argument it would actually be an operation. The operation would consist of an effective reduction of all the contents of the world objectified by the sciences [biology, economics, psychology, sociology, logic, mathematics, phenomenology, philosophy, etc.] to phenomena, terms, relations, correlations, operations and demonstrations of that specific science that is physics.

For example, a physical theory of supply and demand that reduces it to relationships between, so to speak, their masses and their covalent bonds. A physical theory of the Pythagorean theorem that reduces it to relationships between atoms of some element, etc.

Is that something impossible? If it is impossible then we need another ontology. A more pluralistic ontology that can identify genres and irreducible categories. But also an ontology that identifies how these genres and categories of what exists are related to each other. — JuanZu

I think you're echoing Chalmers, but going beyond asking for a theory of consciousness to asking for a theory of abstractions (like math) as well. He said we should start with just proposing phenomenal consciousness as a thing to be explained by science, similarly to the way gravity was added, with no insistence that science as it is has to be able to answer it. It could be that we have to wait for more quantum theory answers? Or maybe a type of physics that we haven't thought of yet.

t seems to me that supervenience is all about existential dependency — creativesoul

I don't think it's about dependency. It's just that two things that track together: "There cannot be an A-difference without a B-difference."

I think that the only possible argument for physicalism has to start from a neutral monist metaphysical position, then argue that emergent psychological properties are real, in a strong sense. So mind is not denied but rather affirmed at the physical level. — Pantagruel

I think this is the most popular view today, right?

This is the ontology he lays out in "The Idea of the World," which is a collection of essays from different times, so it might very well be he has changed his ideas since the. It is in his arguments against physicalism, not in his positive claims for his own substitute, that he talks about how "all the evidence for a physical external world is just as much evidence for an external mental world."

The positive ontology is based on claims that such objects are essentially "composed of mentation." They are ideas/thoughts in a cosmic mind and we, individual minds, a disassociated parts of the universal mind. It's not a process metaphysic where change is fundemental. It doesn't really draw much on the old idea of ousia except in that the focus is on some "thing," the universal mind and its mentation, being fundemental, not change and process as in a process metaphysics. That's all I mean by "substance," here, that there is an ontologically primitive type of thing that exists, whose interactions produce the apparent variety and change we see around us (with or without strong emergence, but probably without given Kim's arguments), as opposed to flux and process being fundemental. Substance is the "substrate" or "prime matter," a concept that seems necessary to make superveniance or causal closure work, at least in forms I am familiar with.


He sort of discusses this here: https://www.bernardokastrup.com/2022/01/reality-is-nothing-and-everything-at.html?m=1

The second thing to notice is that the 'nothing' I am talking about is a mental nothing, not an absolute nothing; it is a mental substrate without substance in the exteriorized sense we use the word 'substance,' not an absence of substrate. As such, I am talking about no-thing, rather than nothing, if we understand for 'things' entities that seem to exist outside mind. My no-thing has an ontological essence (namely, mentality) that exists; it's not an ontic vacuum. This is clear throughout the clip even without its full context, as I constantly speak of a (universal) mind trying to make sense of the fact that it creates everything out of no-thing. My position is thus different from Rovelli's absolute nothing, in which the whole universe is like movement but there is nothing that moves. In my case, there is mind 'moving.'

Also relevant, is that, IMO, Rovelli's ideas probably would qualify as a process metaphysics, and that seems to be the difference he is highlighting. When reading Rovelli's Helgoland, it occured to me that his "entanglement is necessarily a dance for three," idea could easily be adopted to pansemiotic theories. "Relations are fundemental," for Rovelli, and these are always in flux, a process; which would be the same if we conceptualized them as semiosis, which is also a process.




No, I'm afraid I've never heard the name before. The guy who does Coursers courses and teaches at Erasmus University? (Found that through Google)

I don't think it's about dependency. It's just that two things that track together: "There cannot be an A-difference without a B-difference." — frank

:up:

It about being able to talk about the same thing at two different levels of abstraction, what is viewed as the emergent level and the pre-emergent level.

It about being able to talk about the same thing at two different levels of abstraction, what is viewed as the emergent level and the pre-emergent level. — wonderer1

I think so, yea.

I think you're right, but this has at times been identified as a flaw in superveniance that needs to be corrected. What many physicalists would like to say is that the physical facts underlying any mental facts are more essential, and that the physical in some way causes the mental. This shows up in some formulations of the causal closure principle. If they just track together, then there is no reason for us not to talk about mental events having causal efficacy and driving physical events, and no reason to think of one as fundemental. But this would cut against "all causes are ultimately physical."

Granted, I think a great deal of people with this more aggressive view would still say it's fine to talk about mental causes as pragmatic short hand, but they are still supposed to be not only reducible to the physical, but in some way dependant on the physical in a way that the physical is not dependent on the mental.

If you abandon the idea of the physical being fundemental and the mental being caused-by/emerging from the physical (and not vice versa) then it appears like the monosubstance from which all things emerge being "physical" doesn't really explain anything.

I think this is the most popular view today, right? — frank

It seems to me constrained by the burden of the physicalist presupposition though, which is why I didn't attempt to actually construct the argument. I don't disagree with the general characterization, as far as it goes. I just don't see where it is going to.

It seems to me constrained by the burden of the physicalist presupposition though, — Pantagruel

I think that just comes out of being conservative. At least in the anglo-american world, physicalism has been an assumption for a good while.

What many physicalists would like to say is that the physical facts underlying any mental facts are more essential, and that the physical in some way causes the mental. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But multiple realizability means it may not be possible to identify that kind of causal chain. Supervenience becomes the default.

If you abandon the idea of the physical being fundemental and the mental being caused-by/emerging from the physical (and not vice versa) then it appears like the monosubstance from which all things emerge being "physical" doesn't really explain anything. — Count Timothy von Icarus

True. So maybe physicalism has never been an explanation. Maybe it represents a certain mindset? A way of problem solving? One of the outcomes is that if a person is struggling emotionally, they're likely to be piled high with medications meant to support them. To the extent that doing that works, that's the argument for physicalism.

I think one issue with this whole thing is there are various ways you could conceptualize physicalism. On one hand, you can just define it as explanations for everything being directly reducible to fundamental physics explanations. And people have pointed out this almost eliminativist view is very difficult to hold up just by virtue of how we explain and conceptualize a lot of things outside of fundamental physics. But then, is this the kind of physicalism most people hold? Probably not. I think most people are intuitive physicalists and haven't thought too precisely about it but it just seems intuitive to them. I wouldn't be surprised if those big phil surveys, where most people end up being physicalist, are full of respondents of that kind. Maybe they aren't really physicalists but more like naturalists of a general kind in the kind of manner I proposed on the first page of this thread - essentially they are anti-woo.

I think there are probably various different ways and extents of conceptualizing reduction too. I would actually speculate that not much actually outright reduces to something else without needing to invoke some kind of prior assumptions about how different theories connect. Maybe not everything can be satisfactorily explained in physical terms because different fields can have very different conceptual and empirical reference frames and then we have things like emergence and multiple-realizability. But if you accept the models that have held up in science then I find it very difficult not to accept that the objects and structures you find everywhere in your theories about the world in principle depend on, are constrained by, supervene on the structures we find in fundamental physics. You see that their behavior is enacted in or realized within the dynamics of those fundamental physical entities when looking at it from the lense of physics and the scales it operates in. Nothing additional in principle is involved in determining those dynamics even if we may want a more amenable higher-order description / explanation of those dynamics. Even if our fundamental theories are incomplete or cannot pragmatically do all the work on their own, it seems reasonable to suggest that we can describe things in the world at various different scales but the resolution at smallest scales will always produce distinctions that are more fundamental to which others can be decomposed, given the assumption of placing our models within spatiotemporal contexts where there is inevitable nesting.

So maybe physicalism has never been an explanation. — frank

I'd say something more along the lines of physicalism is a label suggesting recognition of the sort of explanations that seem likely to be reliable. You might tell me that the only reason that you don't jump over tall buildings is that your witch doctor told you not to. I'm going to go on respecting the reliability of physics for an explanation.

In any case, physicalism is a philosophical label not an explanation.

Maybe it represents a certain mindset? A way of problem solving? — frank

There is something to that. I'd say it does require developing a rather nontraditional conceptual framework in order to consider things from a physicalist perpective.

The question is whether physicalism should be founded on knowledge. Founded on the knowledge provided by our sciences. Otherwise, ironically, physicalism would be anti-scientific. At this point we can ask ourselves if the multiplicity of sciences can give us an idea or evidence of how the world is constituted. No longer taking each science separately but all the sciences as a whole, and taking irreducibility as evidence.

And of course this evidence must be explained: Why can't we reduce mathematics to physics? And most importantly: How is it that without the need for this reduction we can access truths, demonstrations, correlations, empirical verifications, and so many other scientific validations?. Physicalism, consequently, when put into practice, restricts us from knowing many things and knowing many truths about the world. In this sense I think it can be said that physicalism is scientifically false.

Physicalism, consequently, when put into practice, restricts us from knowing many things and knowing many truths about the world. In this sense I think it can be said that physicalism is scientifically false. — JuanZu

Can you support this?

Yes: without the need for this reduction we can access truths, demonstrations, deductions, correlations, empirical verifications, and so many other scientific validations through other sciences.

It about being able to talk about the same thing at two different levels of abstraction, what is viewed as the emergent level and the pre-emergent level. — wonderer1

Maybe.

I think a supervenience relationship of A upon B is a bit weaker than being able to talk about some A phenomenon/property in terms of some distinct set of B phenomenon/properties. All you need to say that A supervenes upon B is that there can be no A difference without a B difference - you don't need to know a correspondence between A and B, just provide an existential guarantee.

How you flesh out the "cannot" in "There cannot be an A difference without a B difference" is also very important. Since, say, if cannot means "physically impossible", it could still be logically possible that there can be an A difference without a B difference. So an established supervenience relationship in terms of physical possibility could still allow a failure of supervenience relationship in terms of logical possibility between the same A and B to fail.

The argument style I find most persuasive for physicalism is causal closure. If you find that A causes B, it's hard to explain how phenomena of type A could impact phenomena of type B without type A and type B having shared causal structure. Like brain lesions and memory, serotonin and happiness, or light and magnetism.

There's lots of wiggle room in setting up a type, lots of wiggle room in what it means for two types to have an interstice, and even more wiggle room in how you could ensure that all types have such an interstice.

Though such an argument doesn't provide a positive characterisation of the physical, just says that whatever the physical is, it's the only big jumble of everything which exists.

True. So maybe physicalism has never been an explanation. Maybe it represents a certain mindset? A way of problem solving?

Maybe. I just don't see how physicalism differentiates itself from the wider umbrella of naturalism in that case though. I can't think of any reason why objective idealists, dualists, or physicalists couldn't overlap completely on methodology. "Methodological physicalism," seems like a misnomer to me. It seems like it would just be naturalism + a certain set of theory laden ideas. The difference isn't in the methodology, but in contents of the theory ladenness.

One of the outcomes is that if a person is struggling emotionally, they're likely to be piled high with medications meant to support them. To the extent that doing that works, that's the argument for physicalism

This is a good point. I suppose if you have faith in some sort of superveniance relationship where biochemistry reducibly causes mental life, then maybe pharmaceutical treatments seem more plausible. But the way such treatments are selected generally rests on an ontologically neutral set of methodologies.

Plus, I always like to distinguish between physicalism as a philosophy of mind versus physicalism as an ontology. As a philosophy of mind, I think physicalism has some killer arguments that suggest it gets at least some crucial details right. Physicalist philosophy of mind also doesn't have the same need for reductionism to be coherent, minds don't need to reduce to brains, embodied cognition still works, etc. Physicalism as an ontology seems to have significantly larger issues, both with evidence and coherence.



I think you get a lot right here, especially in terms of people not really having taken that much time to consider the issue deeply. That said, I wouldn't underestimate the degree to which reductive physicalism is the default view of the public, and seen broadly as what "science says the world is like."

If I get into debates about free will and people embrace fatalism or are simply afraid fatalism can't be overcome, 9 times out of 10 the reason they think fatalism is true is because:

1. Minds are caused by brain activity.
2. Brains are made of atoms and everything they do can be explained in terms of how atoms act.
3. Atoms lack intentionality.
4. Ergo, intentionality is in some way illusory.

And this is also why compatibilism doesn't seem appealing to them. The problem isn't just that the mind is determined by what comes before any volitional act, it's that mental life has no causal efficacy because real causal power rests with the atoms and molecules. Often I also see a conflation where "if determinism is true then reductionism/smallism is also true," so that evidence for determinism (strong in some contexts IMO) becomes evidence for smallism (weak IMO).

I also found this view to be dominant in neuroscience when I was in school, far more than I have found it to be dominant with physics writers themselves. I think part of the reason for this is the fact that, as mentioned above, physicalism re philosophy of mind is more convincing then physicalism as an ontology, but it's easy to conflate them and take evidence for the former as being evidence for the latter.



I don't think physicalism is anti-science. It certainly can be, but so can idealism or dualism. Dogma and presuppositions invariably affect science, theory ladenness, etc. Physicalism is a philosophical standpoint, and it's key exponents are generally quite aware of this. But I do think you get at a real phenomena where it is possible to conflate physicalism with science, and this can have deleterious effects for how people view or practice science.

Maybe. I just don't see how physicalism differentiates itself from the wider umbrella of naturalism... — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't see much distinction between physicalism and naturalism, other than in usage. My impression is that "physicalism" is just the word more commonly used in the context of discussing philosophy of mind. For example, the question on the 2020 Philpapers survey is, "Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism?". If "physicalism" was replaced with "naturalism" would it make a difference?

Maybe. I just don't see how physicalism differentiates itself from the wider umbrella of naturalism...
— Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't see much distinction between physicalism and naturalism, other than in usage. My impression is that "physicalism" is just the word more commonly used in the context of discussing philosophy of mind. For example, the question on the 2020 Philpapers survey is, "Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism?". If "physicalism" was replaced with "naturalism" would it make a difference? — wonderer1

A number of writers make a distinction between physicalism and naturalism on the basis of the inclusion or exclusion of the role of subjective point of view in the determination of the object.

Evan Thompson writes:

"I follow the trajectory that arises in the later Husserl and continues in Merleau-Ponty, and that calls for a rethinking of the concept of “nature” in a post-physicalist way—one that doesn't conceive of fundamental nature or physical being in a way that builds in the objectivist idea that such being is intrinsically or essentially non-experiential.

Many philosophers have argued that there seems to be a gap between the objective, naturalistic facts of the world and the subjective facts of conscious experience. One way of formulating the hard problem is to ask: if we had a complete, canonical, objective, physicalist account of the natural world, including all the physical facts of the brain and the organism, would it conceptually or logically entail the subjective facts of consciousness? If this account would not entail these facts, then consciousness must be an additional, non-natural property of the world.

One problem with this whole way of setting up the issue, however, is that it presupposes we can make sense of the very notion of a single, canonical, physicalist description of the world, which is highly doubtful, and that in arriving (or at any rate approaching) such a description, we are attaining a viewpoint that does not in any way presuppose our own cognition and lived experience. In other words, the hard problem seems to depend for its very formulation on the philosophical position known as transcendental or metaphysical realism.

Metaphysical realism assumes that everyday experience combines subjective and objective features and that we can reach an objective picture of what the world is really like by stripping away the subjective. It consequently argues that there is a clear distinction to be drawn between the properties things have “in themselves” and the properties which are “projected by us”. Whereas the world of appearance, the world as it is for us in daily life, combines subjective and objective features, science captures the objective world, the world as it is in itself. But to think that science can provide us with an absolute description of reality, that is, a description from a view from nowhere; to think that science is the only road to metaphysical truth, and that science simply mirrors the way in which Nature classifies itself, is – according to Putnam – illusory. It is an illusion to think that the notions of “object” or “reality” or “world” have any sense outside of and independently of our conceptual schemes. Putnam is not denying that there are “external facts”; he even thinks that we can say what they are; but as he writes, “what we cannot say – because it makes no sense – is what the facts are independent of all conceptual choices”.

We cannot hold all our current beliefs about the world up against the world and somehow measure the degree of correspondence between the two. It is, in other words, nonsensical to suggest that we should try to peel our perceptions and beliefs off the world, as it were, in order to compare them in some direct way with what they are about. This is not to say that our conceptual schemes create the world, but as Putnam writes, they don't just mirror it either. Ultimately, what we call “reality” is so deeply suffused with mind- and language-dependent structures that it is altogether impossible to make a neat distinction between those parts of our beliefs that reflect the world “in itself” and those parts of our beliefs that simply express “our conceptual contribution.” The very idea that our cognition should be nothing but a re-presentation of something mind-independent consequently has to be abandoned.

I think Joseph Rouse’s distinctions are helpful. He distinguishes between orthodox, liberal and radical naturalisms.

Orthodox naturalists divide over the unity of science: physicalists insist that what there is can ultimately be reduced to or supervenes upon physical entities, or that the methods of the “special sciences” are dependent upon or legitimated by an understanding of their physical basis; pluralists recognize the ontological or methodological autonomy of astronomy, chemistry, biology, the neurosciences, and perhaps geology or the environmental sciences.

Rouse’s radical naturalism shares with liberal naturalism “a more pluralistic conception of scientific understanding than is characteristic of orthodox naturalisms, and reject conceptions of nature that would require error-theoretic, reductionist, or non-truth-conducive treatments of conceptual, epistemic, moral/political, or aesthetic normativity. I endorse liberal naturalists’ emphasis upon “anti-supernaturalism” as the most definitive naturalist commitment, and my view has some overlap with the primacy some liberal naturalists (e.g., Price 2004, 2011) accord to understanding human conceptual and epistemic capacities as natural phenomena (“subject naturalism”) over seeking scientific imprimatur for a physicalist or other scientistic metaphysics.”

That's all I mean by "substance," here, that there is an ontologically primitive type of thing that exists, whose interactions produce the apparent variety and change we see around us (with or without strong emergence, but probably without given Kim's arguments), as opposed to flux and process being fundemental. Substance is the "substrate" or "prime matter," a concept that seems necessary to make superveniance or causal closure work, at least in forms I am familiar with. — Count Timothy von Icarus

:up: Thanks for the clarification. Much nearer to how I understand it also.

Why would brains be any less shaped by evolution than other biological organs? So "What could be wrong with that?", aside from your dislike of the idea? — wonderer1

Because evolutionary biology is not philosophy, per se, and never set out to address issues of epistemology and metaphysics. Also because of the role that evolutionary biology occupies in culture as a kind of secular religion. And because of its place in the materialist polemics of new atheism where it is presented as a philosophical perspective when it’s clearly not.

The very idea that our cognition should be nothing but a re-presentation of something mind-independent consequently has to be abandoned. — Evan Thompson

:100:

Evan Thompson writes: — Joshs

Ultimately, what we call “reality” is so deeply suffused with mind- and language-dependent structures that it is altogether impossible to make a neat distinction between those parts of our beliefs that reflect the world “in itself” and those parts of our beliefs that simply express “our conceptual contribution.” The very idea that our cognition should be nothing but a re-presentation of something mind-independent consequently has to be abandoned. — Joshs

Just checking is this Thompson? I always thought this quote was credited to Dan Zahavi, (2008) Internalism, Externalism, and Transcendental Idealism. Synthese 160:355-374

Just checking is this Thompson? I always thought this quote was credited to Dan Zahavi, (2008) Internalism, Externalism, and Transcendental Idealism. Synthese 160:355-374 — Tom Storm

You’re right, the first two paragraphs are Thompson and the last two are from Zahavi. Good catch ( didnt think anyone was paying attention).

I always read what you post. I can't claim to always understand it, but I am getting better. :wink:

I think the terms do overlap for philosophy of mind. It's in ontology when I see more room between them. In ontology, physicalism is normally packaged with ideas about supervenience, causal closure, and to a lesser extent, smallism, that I don't see as being essential to naturalism. Plus, if they were to become synonyms then what do we do about all the idealists who claim to be naturalists but not physicalists! (Or the physicalists who appeal to non-natural, eternal propositions to explain language)

A number of writers make a distinction between physicalism and naturalism on the basis of the inclusion or exclusion of the role of subjective point of view in the determination of the object.

This too.

As to Thompson, this is a good description of the sort of backdoor dualism that can creep into physicalism, and substantial problems with popular versions of it. I'm very sympathetic to realist intuitions, but I think there is a serious problem in trying to define realism in terms of entities' "mind-independence" when the very fact that we are thinking of them shows they are, in a crucial way, not independent of our minds. The only realism that would seem to work to me would be a realism that wraps around/contains the subjective/objective distinction, rather than trying to reduce one to the other.

Why would brains be any less shaped by evolution than other biological organs? So "What could be wrong with that?", aside from your dislike of the idea?
— wonderer1

Because evolutionary biology is not philosophy, per se, and never set out to address issues of epistemology and metaphysics. — Wayfarer

That's a non-sequitur. How about a more substantive response? Why would brains be any less shaped by evolution than other biological organs?

Philosophy doesn't need to be the sort of anti-intellectual activity you would have it be.

Also because of the role that evolutionary biology occupies in culture as a kind of secular religion. — Wayfarer

Quoting from your link:

So, what does our history tell us? Three things. First, if the claim is that all contemporary evolutionism is merely an excuse to promote moral and societal norms, this is simply false. Today's professional evolutionism is no more a secular religion than is industrial chemistry...

I am asking a scientific question. The only religion involved, is the religion you bring to the question and the only times you object to science being brought up on TPF is when it challenges your religious beliefs. Can you put your religion aside and suggest a scientific answer?