Hmm. What is it you are disagreeing with?

What I did was to suggest that we cold simplify the issue of what "physicalism" is by sticking to physics. — Banno

I think reifying "physicalism" as you seem to be doing is kind of silly. The word "physicalism" is a label people use for a set of perspectives some people have.

You seem intent on setting up a strawman, rather than deal with the perspectives of individuals who find it to be a useful label.

What I did was to suggest that we cold simplify the issue of what "physicalism" is by sticking to physics. — Banno

Banno embodies a jester. Once you realize that his posts are easily understood.

It involves the evidence of offered by physics, surely, but also some other sciences as well. Given its relation to philosophy of mind, it’s also about biology and chemistry, for example. — NOS4A2

Sure. Physicalism supposes biology and chemistry are variations of physics.

...reifying... — wonderer1

?
How is what I said a reification of physicalism? What could that mean?

Directly to the personal attack. Nice.

But what I've said here does negate the possition you have take over your last few threads, especially the causal necessity stuff. I'm not surprised that you feel the need to resort to this.

Banno embodies a jester. Once you realize that his posts are easily understood. — Philosophim

Well, a fucking brilliant jester, and I enjoy a lot of what he has to say. So I'll leave that there. :wink:

:cool:

How is what I said a reification of physicalism? What could that mean? — Banno

I'll leave you to think about it.

:blush:

Here's a nice description of the physics of billiards, using formulae for conservation of momentum and so on. — Banno

It doesn’t? From the article: ‘When a body is subjected to a force, the second principle of dynamics asserts that its acceleration and speed change. When one body collides with another, momentum is created.’ The collision causes the momentum to be created. You don’t need to use the word ‘cause’ to convey that, which is why I said it is implicit.

Directly to the personal attack. Nice. — Banno

Well, when you’re out of ammo, you’ll resort to throwing anything.

One of the issues with thinking in terms of local efficient causes is that it ignores global conditions, which produces a false impression of strict linearity or "causal chains" instead of networks of energetic influences. — Janus

That’s the difference between classical physics and more recent science, systems theory, biosemiotics, complexity sciences and so on. They all take into account context in a way that Newtonian physics does not.

I don't think this got the attention it deserves:

The statement that "only physical statements are true" is not a statement in physical terms. It is neither falsifiable nor demonstrable. — Banno

The simplest and cleanest way to understand physicalism is as the idea that only the stuff described in physics texts is true. — Banno

Maybe, but I've always thought that both physicalism and materialism were theories of mind, as usually discussed anyway. I'm not at all sure what one has said about something when one says it is physical, but typically people don't mean 'has a mind' or 'is conscious'. But some think it's fine to include mind in the conception of physical.

But what I've said here does negate the possition you have take over your last few threads, especially the causal necessity stuff. I'm not surprised that you feel the need to resort to this. — Banno

I didn't mean it as an insult, only a description. Jester's are entertaining after all.

Banno embodies a jester. Once you realize that his posts are easily understood. — Philosophim

If I link to this image, I'm not using it, I'm advertising Madden's web site...

That was a hesitation for myself as well, so upon understanding that we're including those (and, I'm guessing, others like it) that works as a place to begin. There's a rich body of texts which serve as examples, and it's not like they're arbitrarily chosen -- generally if we're a physicalist we'll think that those texts are the most likely to be true, or that they're the best descriptions we have right now, or something like that.

Perhaps physicalism is the belief that these texts not only can, but should serve as a basis for metaphysical theses.

There is a problem with defining physicalism as just physical matter. How do you account for anything non-physical? What would that be and how could it exist?

Instead, define physicalism as everything that is physical AND identify that physical brains can deal with non-physical subject matter. That accounts for everything and gives some insight to why matter and mind are different in kind. And doesn't resort to a supernatural.

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. — frank

Certainly what I have said is close to what Chalmers thinks. Although I would not go so far as to talk about the mental, the mathematical, etc. as something fundamental in the sense that simple fundamental particles exist. I would simply say that there are phenomena that are given. And we are fortunate that to the extent that we work with these phenomena, other things appear: laws, relationships, correlations, demonstrations, and certain epistemological closures (or categorical closures) that make a set of phenomena and objects something exclusive to a science. : Physics does not have language as its object of study, nor the rational actors of the economy, nor the Pythagorean theorem, etc.

Something that generally happens to reductionism when it fails to carry out a reduction is that it tries to proceed by presupposing semantically, phenomenologically, and practically what it intends to reduce. To take an example: If we imagine that thanks to some kind of super advanced experiment we can associate a certain experience (say, seeing a dog) with some quantum determination in the brain, we have to talk to our guinea pig in terms different from those of physics so that we can carry out the association: "Think of a dog", or "see this picture of a dog" we say to the subject of the experiment. But without the semantic content of those words and the knowledge of what an experience is (without using terms from physics) we would not be able to carry out the experiment or any association between the experience and "brain physics."

As result these things that appear to us in scientific practice (relations, correlations, discoveries, demonstrations, principles, laws, etc.) are also literally reduced to nothing if we carry out a physicalist reduction. The result is that we have a poorer, reduced and scarce knowledge of the world.

Yes, it's a matter of perspective—I see it more as a case of those being better understand as physical, material or natural processes than as being "reduced to explained away" by that understanding. It doesn't seem to me that anything important is being lost or diminished by thinking that way. — Janus

I agree nothing is lost. Though I want to highlight the possibility of eliminative materialism. This is where the use of texts will become a little tricky, and controversial: if we were to set up a gradient between positions from the eliminative materialist to the non-reductive physicalist, what does the eliminative materialist eliminate? My thought is the non-reductive physicalist would accept at least some anthropology as worthy of ontological thought.

I would simply say that there are phenomena that are given. — JuanZu

So you think numbers are phenomena? I had thought they were intelligible objects and, as such, distinguishable from senseable phenomena.

Agree with your second point.

Curious. I'd taken reductionism within the sciences as granted - that physicalism would consider all the sciences variations on physics; after all, the crux of physicalism is that everything is just physics.

I agree that there is a difficulty for physicalism in dealing with metaphysics, including its own.

Is metaphysics some third thing?
Matter, mind and metaphysics.

Seems like matter and mind are all you need.

Curious. I'd taken reductionism within the sciences as granted - that physicalism would consider all the sciences variations on physics; after all, the crux of physicalism is that everything is just physics. — Banno

There is wiggle room on what a reduction consists in.

EG, from the linked SEP article, one version of reductionism is:

Reductionism is true iff for each mental predicate F there is a neurobiological predicate G such that a sentence of the form ‘x is F iff x is G’ expresses a bridge law.

If you could provide a theoretical guarantee that, eg sensation type properties require changes in neurone type properties in human bodies, that would be a supervenience physicalism without expressing any particular correspondence between sensation type properties and neurone type properties.

As an example, you can derive Coulomb's Law from Maxwell's equations - deriving point charge behaviour from electromagnetic field behaviour. That's a "bridge law" reduction.

But you perhaps can't derive society behaviour from chemical behaviour. Even though you can argue persuasively that every societal change must be associated to a change in the chemical constituents of entities within that society... And if no constituents changed there could have been no societal change. That's an absence of a "bridge law" reduction, but within the scope of a supervenience physicalism.

The issue is that if only physical statements are true, then what is the truth value of "only physical statements are true"?

Lost me.

Curious. I'd taken reductionism within the sciences as granted - that physicalism would consider all the sciences variations on physics; after all, the crux of physicalism is that everything is just physics. — Banno

I think that it's the generally desired path, but that in terms of science texts that relationship is still being worked out. Not that it's an unreasonable belief that they cohere, even -- but there's no deduction of natural selection from physics, at least, so we'd have to specify this coherence in spelling out a physicalism.

But you perhaps can't derive society behaviour from atom behaviour. Even though you can argue persuasively that every societal change must be associated to a change in the chemical constituents of entities within that society... And if no constituents changed there could have been no societal change. That's an absence of a "bridge law" reduction, but within the scope of a supervenience physicalism. — fdrake

Nice. That's very clear.

is "only physical statements are true" a physical statement? It doesn't look like it - it looks like metaphysics. So if only physical statements are true, then "only physical statements are true" is not true...

That is, physicalism would be paradoxical.

Okay, got it.

I have my own categories.

"Cause" isn't a term used in physics, having been replaced by maths since Galileo. But it lingers in meta-physics and in pop philosophy of science.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. I read a lot of popular physics and physics articles and cause is mentioned frequently. There is, for instance, all of Wheeler and Penrose's work on retrocausality.

If "cause" had been removed from "physics" back in Galileo's day then why was Russell's argument against cause novel and influential (for a time) in physics proper? Causal eliminitivism ala Russell is a decidedly minority opinion, while the rejection of causal relations is probably safely in the majority, making the status of cause nuanced. Which is why you still see books being published with titles like "Causation and Its Basis in Fundemental Physics."

Questions of causation, like eternalism, are properly part of metaphysics, but that doesn't stop physicists from writing about them, even in popular science books. Which is why it so easy to get the idea that "physics says eternalism is true," when in fact it's:

A. Hard to see how this could ever be empirically tested.
B. The popularity of eternalism with physicists is largely grounded in philosophical arguments, also with Russell being very prominent there, that have become part of the physics literature through osmosis. E.g., when Davies discusses why eternalism is the case, all his arguments have their origins with philosophers.

"Cause isn't in physics," would seem to me something like "physics shows eternalism to be the case," except at least in the latter case eternalism is at least widely popular, whereas eliminitivism on cause is not.

More than a century ago, Russell launched a forceful attack on causation, arguing not only that modern physics has no need for causal notions but also that our belief in causation is a relic of a pre-scientific view of the world. He thereby initiated a debate about the relations between physics and causation that remains very much alive today. While virtually everybody nowadays rejects Russell’s causal eliminativism...

And while I assume my reading could be biased, I hope specialist reviewers would keep stuff like this out of abstracts if I was that far off.

That's where this becomes much more interesting, and difficult. I've no choice but to acknowledge the possibility, but I'll also insist on pointing out that we are a ways from showing such reductions empirically, and also that there are alternatives, such as anomalous monism - that "perhaps (we) can't derive society behaviour from atom behaviour"...

There remains the disconcerting ideas of Ratcliffe and the like. But would that amount to physicalism? I'm not sufficiently familiar with the argument. I could see a connectionism running alongside a folk account of intentionality, but again it is difficult to see how there could be causal links between them.

Paul Churchland's work has been very interesting.

I read a lot of popular physics and physics articles and cause is mentioned frequently. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I've had an eye out for a few years, using test searches and the like, and while it appears occasionally in more philosophically oriented articles, its appearances in physics texts appear overwhelmingly incidental. It would be wonderful to run my suspicion through Google Ngram Viewer, or through Wolfram, to get something firmer.

What I would like to draw attention to is the different way "cause" is used in talk of scientific method and metaphysics, to how it is used in science texts. The descriptions of the movement of billiard balls mentioned above use equations of conservation of momentum, because they are far more nuanced than "A causes B". Talk of causes in physics is usually shorthand or folk talk for something far more useful.

So my ancient and now decrepit copy of Sears Zemansky and Young doesn't mention "cause" in the index. Nor does Penrose' index in The Road to Reality.

So much for it being a key concept in physics.