Interesting paper, thanks, though I lack the background for some of the science. Still, I think I get the point. But I don't understand how anything Anderson says refutes a potentially physicalist understanding of the world. He refutes reductionism very well, but my attempt to invent a "best we can do now" version of physicalism was not meant to affirm reductionism, quite the contrary. Maybe the question I should be asking is, What is there in Anderson's paper that introduces a non-physical level of construction, or implies that there's anything "beyond the physical"?

There are many, many diverse voices in that 'systems science' and biosemiosis field, and not all of them are beholden to any kind of physicalism. As you well know, there is a pretty free-wheeling form of scientific idealism associated with physics and variants of the Copenhagen interpretation, and many of them take mind to be fundamental, in an epistemological if not ontological sense. Same too with biosemiotics. Check out Søren Brier's academic homepage (and I was alerted to him by Apokrisis) - titles like 'Information and consciousness: A critique of the mechanistic concept of information', 'Bateson and Peirce on the pattern that connects and the sacred'. I also found a paper by Marcello Barbieri on the history of biosemiosis and it's very wide-ranging.

On the whole, I think physicalism is on the wane. It's real heyday was actually the late 19th century, I think the scientific justification for it was demolished by the introduction of quantum physics in 1927.

Check out Søren Brier's academic homepage (and I was alerted to him by Apokrisis) - titles like 'Information and consciousness: A critique of the mechanistic concept of information', 'Bateson and Peirce on the pattern that connects and the sacred'. I also found a paper by Marcello Barbieri on the history of biosemiosis and it's very wide-ranging. — Wayfarer

I'll take a look..

On the whole, I think physicalism is on the wane. It's real heyday was actually the late 19th century, I think the scientific justification for it was demolished by the introduction of quantum physics in 1927. — Wayfarer

:up:

As Baden was indicating, if you provide physicalism with the baggage of every phenonemon, it loses its explanatory power as to what "physical" even means.. However, a lot of the metaphysical questions belie the framework needed for physicalism. What does "perspective" even mean for a physicalist? The view from a place (somewhere/nowhere/everywhere) doesn't matter to physicalism, but it is important to us, the conscious human who knows there are perspectives. And then what does an a-perspectival philosophy entail? If it is math, forces, and energy/matter, what are we talking about without perspective really? Then we are back to things like panpsychism, object-oriented philosophy, process philosophy, and information theory.. all things that would stretch the concept of "physical" beyond what we often mean by a naive physicalism.

if you provide physicalism with the baggage of every phenonemon, it loses its explanatory power as to what "physical" even means. — schopenhauer1

Quite! The sources I've been reading and listening to of late - these include Bernardo Kastrup, Evan Thompson and John Vervaeke - are open to perspectives more often associated with religious philosophies. They're not formally religious - Thompson has a book called Why I am not a Buddhist - but they're open to considering those perspectives. And I think much of the motivation for physicalism has been based on the delineating it from anything that might be associated with such perspectives. It's like an implicit prohibition, or even a taboo (as Alan Watts said). That is one of the main points of the Thomas Nagel essay mentioned above, Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion, resulting, he says, in 'the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind. Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning, and design as fundamental features of the world. Instead they become epiphenomena, generated incidentally by a process that can be entirely explained by the operation of the non-teleological laws of physics on the material of which we and our environments are all composed.' And that is the default for a lot of people and questioning it often results in accusations of 'supporting creationism' (one which was actually levelled at Nagel!) So that's a fault line, like a cultural tectonic plate.

But there has been a sea change in culture since the 1960's, what with the growth of ecological awareness, ideas relating to higher consciousness (mainly originating from the East) and a kind of scientically-informed idealism which you can find even in relatively hard-headed popular intellectuals like Paul Davies. Tao of Physics was another pop milestone. The times they are a'changing.

The alternative is a view of science which opens the door to the soft sciences, including theology. If the repeatability requirement is softened then interpersonal realities can be the subject of scientific study, because repeated interpersonal interactions do yield true and reliable knowledge, even though the repeatability is not as strict as that of the lab scientist who deals with a passive and subordinate substance. — Leontiskos

Quite agree. As a resident idealist, I'm often challenged to prove my claim that there can be such a thing as 'higher knowledge', beyond merely subjective conviction or faith. The argument is there is no method of inter-subjective validation for such claims, in the way there is for peer-reviewed, objective science.

I will often answer that there is indeed a kind of peer-review and 'quality control' method, if you like, in spiritual cultures, such as Zen Buddhism, and I'm sure there have been analogies in other cultural settings. These provide an environment where there is instruction, execution and judgement by higher authorities, in lineages that have persisted for centuries, millenia even. (The Buddhist Sangha is arguably the oldest social organisation still in existence.)

The real problem with the idea of higher knowledge is the lack of a vertical axis against which the term 'higher' is meaningful. But that is the very thing that physicalism has undermined. Physicalism has a 'flat ontology', with matter (or nowadays, matter-energy-space-time) being the sole constituent of existence. This was the point of Robert M. Pirsig's book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which recognised the lack of a 'metaphysics of quality' in Western culture. Another of those 'consciousness raising' books from that era.

I will often answer that there is indeed a kind of peer-review and 'quality control' method, if you like, in spiritual cultures, such as Zen Buddhism... — Wayfarer

Yep, and intersubjective validation/confirmation.

The real problem with the idea of higher knowledge is the lack of a vertical axis against which the term 'higher' is meaningful. But that is the very thing that physicalism has undermined. Physicalism has a 'flat ontology', with matter (or nowadays, matter-energy-space-time) being the sole constituent of existence. — Wayfarer

Yes, that's a good point. What's curious is that often higher knowledge is called "wisdom," and I would think that the physicalist would admit that a physicalist possesses wisdom that a non-physicalist does not possess. That is, the ability to know and understand the metaphysical basis of reality constitutes wisdom. Then enters the age-old question of how to account for reason or intellect in terms of the physical.

That is, the ability to know and understand the metaphysical basis of reality constitutes wisdom. — Leontiskos

There's a nice term you encounter in the writings of some of those who advocate for a philosophia perennis, the perennial philosophy. That is, sapiential, as distinct from (but not necessarily in opposition to) scientific. Hence, the 'sapiential traditions.' In my case, those that I know at least something about are Christian Platonism, Vedanta, and Mahāyāna Buddhism.

In all of them, there is the implicit idea of the 'philosophical ascent', and that knowledge of the real is contingent upon qualities of character - which is something different to 'scientific detachment' even if you can trace how the latter developed out of the former (James Hannam's 'God's Philosophers' is really good on that.) That what is 'higher' is also possessed of a greater reality. You find that also in the German idealists (ref).

But I think the key thing is, all of those traditions emphasise self negation and the requirement of transcending egoic consciousness ('he who looses his life for My sake'), whereas science and liberal individualism is grounded very much in the individual's self -awareness. I'm not wishing to present that as a value judgement or to dissapprove of it, but as a philosophical perspective.

But I don't understand how anything Anderson says refutes a potentially physicalist understanding of the world. He refutes reductionism very well, but my attempt to invent a "best we can do now" version of physicalism was not meant to affirm reductionism, quite the contrary. — J

I think the only way the kind of physicalism you described can be tenable is if we buy into reductionism. I can easily identify phenomena that are obviously not physical, e.g. the mind, society. The only way those can be reasonably considered physical is if you could support the claim that they are reducible to physics.

Published in 1924, Burtt's work explores how the shift to a scientific worldview in the 17th century was underpinned by (often unstated) metaphysical assumptions.

I find the metaphysics of science interesting, so I bought it. I’ve only just started reading, but it looks pretty good so far. I especially like that he has been very specific about what’s included in the metaphysics of modern pre-quantum physics as well as medieval and ancient science.

I agree, good book. Standard text in philosophy of science in years past.

I think this is a good line of argument. I had thought of physicalism, also metaphorically, as kind of a snake pit where whenever one snake pops its head up and you cut it off, another one simply reappears in its place, reflecting the adaptive ability of physicalism to proliferate new versions of itself in response to new objections. This overall amorphism seems highly suspect in the context of scientifc endeavour. But then the question arises, as you and others have pointed out, is it really realistic to presume you can entirely rid yourself of that type of problem and "just do" science under the guidance of methodological naturalism or some other supposedly more neutral framework? Aren't there snakes everywhere? Aren't there metaphysical commitments inherent in making your job philosophically coherent as an enterprise?

I think to an extent there are. And an associated problem is even finding generally accepted definitions of the concepts in question, so that hard lines can be drawn. Perhaps the scientific method, methodological naturalism, metaphysical naturalism (including physicalism) can be placed on a kind of spectrum of increased commitment and perhaps even that modest enterprise has its complications. — Baden

Yes, good. First I want to say that every metaphysics is going to be a little bit like a regenerating hydra by definition. This is because the metaphysics provides a scientific paradigm, and to falsify a paradigm is more difficult than to falsify a theory. Paradigm shifts are unwieldy. Nevertheless, if a paradigm shift is made impossible by the ambiguity of the metaphysics then there is something wrong with the metaphysics. A metaphysics should be durable but not invincible.

Second, there is a significant difference between an explicit metaphysics and an implicit metaphysics. In some ways those on my side of the aisle want to say that the methodological naturalist should get explicit about his implicit metaphysics. I think this is clearly right, at least to the very limited extent that the methodological naturalist needs to explicitly admit that he has an implicit metaphysics. Does he need to go further and "make it explicit"? Not necessarily. That may not be the job of the scientist, and it may be imprudent for him to try if he is not up to the task. If his metaphysics is a fuzzy background to his theories, then it may be better to leave it fuzzy rather than try to explicate what is not clear. I want to say that the scientist only needs to muster his metaphysics when he is challenged on that front, but that for the most part he should leave it alone.

But I still think its useful to try to get out Occam's razor and try to do what we can, especially when one finds oneself defending science against ideological and metaphysical encroachment in general. — Baden

Sure, but if science is the grass and metaphysics is the soil then I would want to talk about the kind of soil/metaphysics required, namely rich or fertile soil. If that is the right analogy, then we would never talk about soil encroachment in general.

I was just told about a new book in this area: Spencer Klavan's, "Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Illuminating Science through Faith." Apparently he makes a case that the (religious) metaphysics of the West birthed science.

But qualitative studies do play a part in science and the soft sciences are absolutely drenched in philosophical commitments, particularly structuralist ones. Though, again, there is some kind of division envisioned between methodologies and metaphysics, it's very hard to see where that line really is. That's probably a conversation that's too broad for the scope of this thread, though I won't deny its relevancy. — Baden

:up:

Well, it seems like disavowals of reductionism are increasingly common. However, if the schema is not replaced by anything positive, it seems to leave a vacuum that sucks nominally "anti-reductionists," back into things like referring to people as "brains," defining the human good in terms of "dopamine," and attempting to explore the proper ordering of modern society in terms various hormone and neurotransmitter levels.:roll:

And this has crossed over into the "political right" as well. Jordan Peterson opens up his self-help book aimed at young men by defining the human good in terms of research on lobsters. From the first chapter, the human good is the cultivation of "feel good chemicals," the acquisition of resources, and access to sexual partners.

To be clear, I certainly wouldn't want to say that the human good has nothing to do with these things, or that studying them isn't relevant. Quite the opposite. However, it's seems to me that it's the residue of reductionism that sends authors like Sam Harris off looking for the explanation of societal and individual good in terms of hormone and neurotransmitter levels. To me, this seems a lot like trying to figure out how to build a plane, or how some animals fly, in terms of the chemistry at work in the organelles of flying animals' wings. No doubt, the animals need wings to fly and the wings are composed of cells, but this completely missed the idea of generating principles or unification as set over (or at least as a balance to) reduction.

I guess part of the problem is that unifications are often misunderstood as reductions in popular science.

I guess part of the problem is that unifications are often misunderstood as reductions in popular science. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This of course brings up metaphysical notions of emergence. This is taken for granted in naive physicalism / scientism.

But the metaphysical naturalism of the physicalist posits that as the universe must behave in a law-like manner, i.e. in a way which is replicable and predictive (in principle if not in practice), anything we encounter in the universe that does not seem to behave so, must despite appearances, ultimately do so by virtue of its very existence. — Baden

Is it not thereby falsifiable, or at least made progressively more unlikely? At some point we might encounter a phenomenon whose behavior we despair of ever fitting a law like framework around. For instance, suppose beings seen in supernatural horror movies became commonly observed. Their seeming ability to bend reality to their will would pose a stark challenge to physicalism. Of course science would attempt to meet that challenge, and some movies will introduce an ersatz set of laws into their world, explaining their ghosts in a way that is supposed to satisfy our physicalist intuitions (but seldom successfully). But, science may simply fail to do so, especially if, as a matter of fact, no such laws existed.

Physicalism is the conviction that empirical phenomenon are determined(not necessarily deterministically) by physical laws (what that means is not clear, granted). This may not be the case.