I take it you have to meet him first.

Those words staved me off the path of searching for a teacher. A path in which I’d assign my “enlightenment” to someone else and only through them would I become “free.” This is a path we all, at one point or another, can easily find ourselves caught up in. As the psychotherapist and author Sheldon Kopp once said, “If you have a hero, look again: you have diminished yourself in some way.” Kopp goes on to say, “The most important things that each man must learn, no one else can teach him. Once he accepts this disappointment, he will be able to stop depending on the therapist, the guru who turns out to be just another struggling human being.”

Rather than seeking a teacher to show me the way, I needed to become the way myself, through my own practice, through deep contemplation, through Shikantaza.

Idolizing a teacher is one side of the dilemma. The other lies in the teachings themself. Over the life of our spiritual practice, there may be times when we begin to conceptualize the nonconceptual. We begin to “know” rather than remain open to. When we cling strongly to what we have learned, it becomes easy for us to be convinced that we get it, and in fear of losing it, we begin to hold tightly to it. This fixation ends up becoming a crutch towards our growth. The teacher and teachings are both useful and to some degree, necessary, so they should be utilized, but both also must, ultimately, be allowed to drop away. For one to truly grow in spiritual practice we must let go. Let go of all concepts and remain in an attitude of openness, eagerness, and without preconceptions. A state known, among Zen practitioners, as “beginner’s mind.”

https://www.lionsroar.com/if-you-meet-the-buddha-on-the-road-kill-him/

Supposing science uses cause, that does not then in turn mean that causation is real. Further if cause is real then that could even be read as a strike against physicalism given the Transcendental Idealist interpretation of causation -- even if cause is real it could be that physicalism is false. — Moliere

This is mostly rambling.

Do you think you can articulate a physicalism without a cause concept?

I'd like to think it's possible, since I don't like causation as a concept very much, but I don't know how to do it. I don't tend to like it as a concept because the individuation principles of events seem very ideal, whereas what they model is very material. If you've already got a system which is very well specified, it seems to make sense to think of causation as one change influencing another, because the state of a system is defined... So what counts as a change in a system's state was already specified.

There's an interstice between the above ambiguity and the supervenience discussion we're having. Supervenience isn't explicitly causal, is it. It's about necessary changes. Perhaps that could occur with a necessary correlation rather than a cause.

As an example, if someone has binge eating disorder, that could cause diabetes and damage to their teeth. Assuming that the only thing that influences that person's diabetes and teeth damage is the binge eating disorder, then you would have no diabetes changes without teeth damage changes, and vice versa [two supervenience relations], but no causal relationship between diabetes and tooth damage for that person.

Those two phenomena have a common cause as the stipulated only influence on their behaviour, though. If you lived in a world where you haven't seen the common cause [the binge eating disorder], you could still perhaps see that that person's tooth damage changed only when their diabetes changed. So those two would still have an establish-able supervenience relationship without establishing a causal intermediary.

But I suppose that's different from obviating the requirement of the existence of a causal intermediary for that supervenience relation...

Do you think you can articulate a physicalism without a cause concept? — fdrake

Or concepts in general.

The arguments for physicalism as the OP asked are best when we simply limit the definition of existence to only something material. Concepts, language, ideas, mathematics, logic, all of that can then simply be said to be something else. Perhaps true and logical, but not something that exists.

Of course some can argue that this just is circular reasoning and isn't very useful as we do need all those concepts, models etc. to say anything relevant about what does exist materially in our universe.

Thanks for referring me to that article.

I have read some Harmon, Bryant, Brassier and Meillassoux. I think correlationism is apt when considering the world as 'human world'; we do only experience and understand things as they appear to us. On the other hand, we are able to imagine that things have their own independent existences, while (obviously) not being able to know the nature of those independent existences. We can exercise our imaginations on that question without fear of incoherence or performative contradiction, but definite views are out of the question. That's the way I see our situation, for what it's worth.

We can exercise our imaginations on that question without fear of incoherence or performative contradiction, but definite views are out of the question. That's the way I see our situation, for what it's worth — Janus

You may have a more definite view without being aware of it. That’s why I mentioned the split between Kuhn and Popper on how what’s out there impacts our scientific knowledge. This difference reflects a difference in understanding the nature of reality in itself. I imagine you have a preference between these two philosophies of science.

Zahavi's critique of speculative realism can be found online here.

I'm familiar with that 'koan'. In reality Zen/Ch'an is highly regimented and disciplined and is generally conducted in an atmosphere of strict routine and observance of rules and hierarchy. Have a read of Harold Stewart's take on Westerner's interactions with Japanese Zen. (Stewart was an Australian poet and orientalist who lived the last half of his life in Kyoto.)

Acolytes are expected to develop indifference to the discomforts of heat and cold on a most frugal vegetarian diet and to abstain from self-indulgence in sleep and sex, intoxicating drinks and addictive drugs. Altogether Zen demands an ability to participate in a communal life as regimented and lacking in privacy as the army.

This is mostly rambling. — fdrake

:D -- that's when we're digging into the good stuff, in terms of a conversation at least.

Do you think you can articulate a physicalism without a cause concept?

I gave it a thought and I can't do so -- but I can imagine the possibility.

There's an interstice between the above ambiguity and the supervenience discussion we're having. Supervenience isn't explicitly causal, is it. It's about necessary changes. Perhaps that could occur with a necessary correlation rather than a cause.

As an example, if someone has binge eating disorder, that could cause diabetes and damage to their teeth. Assuming that the only thing that influences that person's diabetes and teeth damage is the binge eating disorder, then you would have no diabetes changes without teeth damage changes, and vice versa [two supervenience relations], but no causal relationship between diabetes and tooth damage for that person.

Those two phenomena have a common cause as the stipulated only influence on their behaviour, though. If you lived in a world where you haven't seen the common cause [the binge eating disorder], you could still perhaps see that that person's tooth damage changed only when their diabetes changed. So those two would still have an establish-able supervenience relationship without establishing a causal intermediary. — fdrake

I think it's interesting to introduce a time-dimension to ideas of supervenience -- the A-level and the B-level can be differentiated time-wise (and note how "time-wise" can mean 1 second, 1 minute, 2 hours, etc.) -- but my understanding of A-level and B-level supervenience is more with respect to objects I think? Moving a plate also moves the number of atoms it's comprised of (though surely at least one atom of silicon or calcium carbonate we had considered "the plate" also rubs off onto our palm? ... the oddity of attempting to use scientific statements in philosophy...) -- but does a moment supervene on the next moment? Maybe, but it seems different. (also I must admit to still struggling with supervenience)

The arguments for physicalism as the OP asked are best when we simply limit the definition of existence to only something material. Concepts, language, ideas, mathematics, logic, all of that can then simply be said to be something else. — ssu

The problem with that is, that physicalism is supposed to be true of everything that is real. Even idealism acknowledges that physical objects exist, but physicalism is the idea that everything is reducible to the physical. For that reason, the most coherent form of physicalism was atomism, which held that indivisible point-particles, combining in endless arrays and combinations, were what was ultimately real. Well, that was until quantum physics and the wave-particle duality and electromagnetic fields came along. Now physicalism usually amounts to scientism - hey, we don't know what everything ultimately is, but if we're going to find out, then science is the way to do it.

The arguments for physicalism as the OP asked are best when we simply limit the definition of existence to only something material. Concepts, language, ideas, mathematics, logic, all of that can then simply be said to be something else. Perhaps true and logical, but not something that exists.

Of course some can argue that this just is circular reasoning and isn't very useful as we do need all those concepts, models etc. to say anything relevant about what does exist materially in our universe. — ssu

I view things to go deeper than that.

Question: In what way can the basic laws of thought either rationally or empirically be evidenced to not in and of themselves be basic laws of nature writ large—such that that which is logically impossible is then deemed to be part and parcel of physical reality?

If laws of thought govern all that is physical, then it is irrational to hold that these very laws of thought emerged (via supervenience or otherwise) out of that which is physical. Instead entailing that the physical itself is contingent on the occurrence of laws of thought—with laws of thought being commonly taken to not be in and of themselves physical unless they were to emerge from the physical.

This then directly points to some form of idealism (an omni-this-and-that deity not being in any way required for its occurrence).

(Quantum weirdness—such as the delayed-choice quantum eraser—is no man’s land in terms of proper interpretations. And these interpretations commonly regard what is metaphysically possible rather than logically so. So quantum weirdness in itself will not evidence what I’m here asking for.)

frank asked at the beginning of this if physicalism could be the grounding to your thinking on philosophy. I think for me that is the case. We can go on and on about physicalism but eventually it's good to move on with an understanding of what our basic grounding is.

Generally, I like physicalism, but I think you miss a lot by stopping at reductionism. Maybe physicalism just gets us to our mental worlds and then we can move on from there

Generally, I like physicalism, but I think you miss a lot by stopping at reductionism. Maybe physicalism just gets us to our mental worlds and then we can move on from there — Mark Nyquist

You once said to me:

I just like to start with physicalism/materialism because it keeps us /me personally from believing things that just aren't true. — Mark Nyquist

I think I know why you say that - I think it's because Western culture has abandoned or rejected ways of thinking that provide an alternative to physicalism. Physicalism seems rational and scientific. Would that be about right?

You may have a more definite view without being aware of it. That’s why I mentioned the split between Kuhn and Popper on how what’s out there impacts our scientific knowledge. This difference reflects a difference in understanding the nature of reality in itself. I imagine you have a preference between these two philosophies of science. — Joshs

It seems reasonable to think that the world as experienced and understood is an aspect or function of the "in itself' (which of course includes the 'human in itself'). But I think that's as far as we can go, because we have no way of determining just how our experience and understanding relates to the in itself, except to think that it must somehow do so. That's what I mean by eschewing definite views beyond the context of human experience and understanding; it might be plausible to think that the way we experience things is related to the nature of the in itself, but there seems to be no way that we could parse that relation in terms of rational or empirical justification.

So, I don't think science has anything much to say here, as I see all of science as dealing only with things as they appear to us. I don't see the Popper/ Kuhn "split" as a significant polemic; I think the views of each can be accommodated within the views of the other.

Sounds like something I would say.
I remember you warning about reductionism and I take that seriously. Actually, how we mentally interact with matter is what seems the most interesting to me. And for some it's the person to person thing so some of that also but I tend to be more physically oriented.

Question: In what way can the basic laws of thought either rationally or empirically be evidenced to not in and of themselves be basic laws of nature writ large—such that that which is logically impossible is then deemed to be part and parcel of physical reality? — javra

Suppose we question taking as axiomatic that there are laws of thought?

Might there be no such things as laws of thought, and what we conceptualize as laws of thought are actually incorrigible intuitions about how language tends to relate to reality? Intuitions arising from pattern recognition applied to observation of the way language is used and relates to regularities in reality. Intutions that began developing in our minds at an age too young for us to even remember.

Is there a way we could distinguish between laws of thought being laws of nature, and 'laws of thought' being incorrigible intuitions related to language and regularities in nature, that have developed in us from a young age?

Is there a way we could distinguish between laws of thought being laws of nature, and 'laws of thought' being incorrigible intuitions related to language and regularities in nature, that have developed in us from a young age? — wonderer1

I will answer yes: rationally. If laws of thought develop from physicality, then, prior to their development, physicality would not be in any conceivable way bound by them. I'm here primarily thinking evolutionarily. This would then differentiate them from laws of nature.

Yet, in favor of the point I intended to initially make regarding some form of idealism, we nevertheless require that physicality in total be intelligible via laws of thought in order to infer that laws of thought in any way develop from physicality.

Yet, in favor of the point I intended to initially make regarding some form of idealism, we nevertheless require that physicality in total be intelligible via laws of thought in order to infer that laws of thought in any way develop from physicality. — javra

What sort of thing is this requirement, that physicality in total be intelligible via laws of thought?

An understanding of biological evolution gives reason to recognize that we wouldn't be here without some regularities to events in the universe. So from such a perspective it is fairly unsurprising that a combination of biological and cultural evolution resulted in truth conveying human language use having regularities which have a correspondence with regularities to events in the universe.

However what mandates a "total" intelligibility?

Furthermore, why think laws of thought are even sufficient to reach a total intelligibility? Suppose instead of laws of thought we consider digital computation? Digital computation is only up to the task, of simulating things to some level of complexity. Is there reason to think application of the laws of thought can do, what digital computation cannot?

What I wanted to ask you is, can you say more about "emergent physicalism?" Is it roughly the same as "process physicalism" (my thesis here is that consciousness just is a physical process) ? — NotAristotle

It is physical but not in the way of the reductionist interpretation. Emergent properties functions as a result of increasing complexity. The gist of it is basically that you might start with basic systems, like particles, and they, as a collective form higher complexities that produce new properties that cannot simply be linked back and explained just by looking at the fundamental particles and their functions themselves. In such systems, the initial mathematical state and starting point, govern and directs how the complexity grows and will define the properties that emerges.

It's a bit more complicated than that, but in essence, when thinking about something like the mind; neurons can be measured to govern different systems of the brain. We can measure how they function and how they control different systems of the body, how memories form etc. but we've yet to explain the holistic nature of the entire mind. We have these separate systems that we can define, but we do not know how they relate to the entirety of our experience existing as a conscious being. But in the concept of an emergent system; all functions in the brain and body collectively increase the complexity and produce a holistic system that operate in new ways. The combination of all produces the result that is our mind.

These behaviors of systems can be found in other areas of research like withing an ecosystem that is extremely complex but cannot be defined by any individual specific animal, plant, insect or bacteria, and cannot be traced up through the ecosystem and be explained by simply those individual parts. We can see the result of the ecosystem functioning as a balanced system that moves and flows in a way that is highly complex and its own thing, but never define it as a thing in its own when viewing its parts. It simply "becomes" out of the complexity it generates.

As an example, people who experienced near death experiences have described that when they get revived and slowly return to consciousness; the ability of understanding the reality around them kicks in step by step, at different levels of understanding, connected to what specific brain system that receives oxygen through blood first. When they go through it, they experience different levels of conscious understanding of their surroundings. They can see and hear, but not understand what anything means, they can see clearly, but do not have a the ability to form those visuals into spatial three dimensional understanding of reality until such systems "turns on" again and all of a sudden; they can perceive reality just like everyone else. They can hear sounds, but make not sense of it, until more systems comes alive and they are able to hear in context again. The more all complex systems start to act in sync and increase in numbers, the more the half-functioning brain that produce only a rudimentary shell of a consciousness, becomes a normal human consciousness.

Of course, these concepts are yet to have full empirical evidence to back them up, even though the science and observations of it leans towards this understanding of consciousness. Many similar types of emergent systems appears all over in nature and they holistically converge many research fields into a general understanding of reality. Basically, there are so many systems in our reality that follows these behaviors that this holistic perspective hints at a fundamental corner stone of how reality functions.

You've misinterpreted what I meant by "physicality in total". In the context used, I intended that physicality of which we are a) directly acquainted with via direct experience (this being concrete physical reality of which we know via our immediate physiological senses) and b) that physicality which we infer to have been, to currently be, and to be in the future - with an example of the latter being physicality before life emerged from nonlife within the cosmos.

So, I don't think science has anything much to say here, as I see all of science as dealing only with things as they appear to us. I don't see the Popper/ Kuhn "split" as a significant polemic; I think the views of each can be accommodated within the views of the other — Janus

The Kuhn-Popper split is one of philosophy rather than science, and the two views definitely cannot be accommodated within each other, any more than postmodernism can be accommodated within realism. They both talk about the allegedly ‘same’ world outside of our schemes, but in terms sharply different from each other.

I'm sympathetic to the idea of something like "physicalism without reductionism," but as is discussed earlier in this thread, I'm not sure such a thing currently makes much sense with how physicalism is generally defined. Physicalism might have to become just a vague commitment to naturalism and metaphysical realism to deal with strong emergence (which, to be fair, I think that's how many people colloquially use the term). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Naturalism is just the broader idea that rejects the supernatural. In that sense, yes, I'm a naturalist as well. I do not think there are any supernatural elements to reality, I think that such things stems from human desperation, that our fears generate the need for supernatural elements to exist in order to cope with reality. Any notion of supernatural in my perspective would be things and beings that exist outside of the physical laws of reality, in essence, if there's a multiverse or higher universe outside of this and it is populated with such beings or existences, then that could be called supernatural. However, in the common terminology, supernatural refers to the fantastical that defies our reality and there is not a single fraction of evidence for any of it and all the witnesses expressing their fantastical anecdotal descriptions of them, when understanding human psychology, technology and physics, can easily be countered. People are generally prone to find patterns and make up imaginative explanations of what they don't understand, it's the foundation of how any religion starts out. Naturalism rejects all that and focus on what is, not what is believed.

Physicalism is part of naturalism, but focuses more on the metaphysical specifics. Especially when it comes to the mind and consciousness, or the nature of reality in terms of physics.

Emergentism generally focus on the scientific observations and theories of emergent properties of complex systems. Since it's found in so many areas of research, it forms an entire sub-category in physicalism. And it generally somewhat counter-argue against reductionism as it specifically points out the problem of direct links between the emergent properties and the less complex parts of the system. That it is problematic to try and quantify the math of that link as it may become too complex for any computational system to summarize it holistically. We may be able to in the future, but we also might not and need to simply conclude that we can't compute it, only understand that it happens.

I would say with high confidence that most scientists do not spend much time focused on the ontology of physicalism, problems related to supervenience, the causal closure principle, etc. Kim's argument against the possibility of strong emergence, given a substance metaphysics, seems very strong. Given that, strong emergence doesn't seem to be an option for physicalism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Strong or weak emergence depends on what we can prove in the future. As I said, it may be that we can't provide an understandable link between the parts and the emergent property (strong emergence), but we can't rule it out and we may be able to compute and observe it some time in the future (weak emergence). As of now we cannot conclude either to be true, but we can conclude that there's observed phenomena that functions by the principles of emergence.

To be sure, I've seen theoreticians who do end up having to consider things like Kim's work suggest a move to a process metaphysics. But this move probably requires jettisoning a lot of what makes physicalism "physicalism."

It's an example of Hemple's Dilemma, I guess. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Physicalism only pinpoints that explanations boils down to physical systems. Emergence co-exist and functions within it through acknowledging such physical fundamentals; but expands them into emerging results that become "extra-physical", or "transcend" the classical definition of "objects".

In terms of Hemple's Dilemma, I'd say that emergence isn't an explanation but rather an observation of a type of behavior of reality. The nature of the behavior differs in each system based on what is producing the emergent properties and in what form it exists. Much like we don't treat a dimension in physics as some specific entity, but rather a general system that's part of defining reality. Emergence, as it seems, has some general attributes that can be found all over our reality and it may be part of how reality itself functions. Therefore I don't think the Hemple's Dilemma applies as it is both very specific in nature, and at the same time a general description of how reality functions. The problem lies in that the research into emergent systems is still pretty modern as a broad description, and still lacks enough empirical evidence to have common appearance in science media reports (some have), and it's just pretty much cutting edge right now that we're looking into it more seriously, coming out of previous purely and classical reductionist approaches. There's a lot of observations already concluded, so it's not as speculatory as many seem to believe, but it's not yet enough to find its way into fundamental parts of theories as frameworks.

Just a thought, but to get away from physicalism, think of how a few calories of energy in your brain can direct millions, billions or trillions of calories in the physical environment. Seems like getting away from the nuts and bolts of physicalism is where the action is.

Okay so if I'm understanding you correctly, what I'm calling a physical process emerges from, is a result of, not the physical fundamentals, rather it is the result of the interaction of those fundamentals where that interaction results in properties that were otherwise not present. As an analogy, H2O, the result of interaction between atoms, is a liquid at room temperature, while oxygen and hydrogen atoms, the constituents, do not have the property of being liquid at room temperature.

With respect to emergent properties - the emergent qualities of substances like glass or water as analogies do not really provide the basis of explanations for consciousness in terms of emergence. New properties can emerge from simpler constituents—glass from sand, liquidity from a combination of hydrogen and oxygen. These examples show that a whole can indeed have properties that its constituent parts do not possess individually, a central idea in emergence theory.

However while these examples demonstrate physical and chemical emergence, they do not adequately address the unique challenges posed by consciousness. The emergence of physical properties like the transparency of glass or the liquidity of water can be (and have been) completely explained through physical and chemical processes. These are objective properties that can be observed and measured from an external perspective.

Consciousness, on the other hand, presents a different kind of problem. It's not just about the emergence of new properties but about the emergence of the capacity for subjective experience. This includes what it feels like to see, feel pain, or taste. This subjective quality is what is not observable or measurable in terms of objective properties of chemical substances. And that is by design, as by design, scientific observation excludes the subject.

Even if we fully understood the brain's physical and biological attributes - and we're a very long way from that - we might still lack an explanation for how these attributes give rise to subjective experience. There is an incommensurability involved which is not bridgeable in terms of more data. This gap in understanding leads us to question whether the concept of emergence, as understood in physical sciences, is sufficient to explain consciousness, or whether it is, at best, just another analogy or metaphor (or straw to grasp at).

Interesting, but what does it mean for something to be physical?

….critique of speculative realism….. — Wayfarer

Oh dear. Correlationism. Yet another “Kantian catastrophe”!!!!

Fascinating, innit? To save ourselves from ourselves, we should understand it’s “…entirely appropriate to ask “What’s it like to be a computer, or a microprocessor, or a ribbon cable?”….”

Sounds an awful lot like the seepage “from the rot of Kantianism” explicitly being denied, to even suggest that question has any relevance. I mean….from whence should one expect to be answered?

Thanks for the interesting read. Small wonder, methinks, that I voluntarily neglect modern thought.

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

I don't think it's about dependency. — frank

Emergence is.

but my understanding of A-level and B-level supervenience is more with respect to objects I think? — Moliere

Me too. I think of it, paradigmatically, in terms of classes of properties which apply to objects. So...

Moving a plate also moves the number of atoms it's comprised of (though surely at least one atom of silicon or calcium carbonate we had considered "the plate" also rubs off onto our palm?

Plate class macroscopic properties supervene on chemical structure level properties.

... the oddity of attempting to use scientific statements in philosophy...) -- but does a moment supervene on the next moment? Maybe, but it seems different. (also I must admit to still struggling with supervenience)

I guess strictly speaking all the events at moment 12:00 could supervene on the set of events at 11:59. If you think of classes of events and objects as properties of the stratum of events and objects which exist at a moment, you would get collections at 12:00 only changing if collections at 11:59 had changed. So assuming the collections are properties, I think that follows.

But there is something a bit iffy in taking those properties to be extensional? As in, the macroscopic properties of the plate seem specified by understanding a (defining?) intension toward it as a macroscopic object; manipulability, colour, texture... On the level of configurations of atoms and structure. Whereas the "structure" of a moment is just that it is an index.

Emergence, as it seems, has some general attributes that can be found all over our reality and it may be part of how reality itself functions. — Christoffer

If monism and evolution are true, emergence must happen.