the human soul contains vegetative, sexual, sensitive, and rational faculties; but does it also contain a racial faculty? — Bob Ross

I suggest you take the advice of @Questioner and educate yourself about human biology rather than try to fit or divide up the complexity of the world into these pre-determined, unjustifiable boxes following the religious nonsense of people that lived centuries and centuries before modern intellectual thought. Absolutely mindboggling.

You might find this interesting:

https://theforensicfunnel.com/p/all-truth-is-relative?utm_source=theforensicfunnel.com&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=all-truth-is-relative&_bhlid=5191cc823ff078c9e62297fdb0862389e04c99b8

quantum theory—has undermined the idea of observer-free, self-standing physical reality. — Wayfarer

But this is not necessarily anything to do with subjectivity or consciousness. Views of quantum theory that do are fringe. The observer-dependence in QM has nothing to do with conscious. It has nothing even to do with people.

My critique targets the shared presupposition of both physicalism and substance dualism — Wayfarer

I think your actual target for your claims is much closer to metaphysical and scientific realism, not physicalism or substance dualism. So I think in a sense there is a kind of category error in your arguments in that keep framing them against the wrong target

He's not solving what you think is the issue. — Wayfarer

Then I don't understand whatbyou are complaining about. Let physics do physics. Let phenomenology do phenomenology. Lets not conflate them.

So there's a fundamental dimension of existence that is left out of objective accounts. — Wayfarer

Well its left out of any account and you don't even want to give an explanation. From my perspective there is no fuss to be made out of it because I am not pretending that physicalism should give a kind of God's eye view of the "intrinsic" nature of reality. Explanations are predictive tools that are open to pluralism and are relational.

What do you think about that? — Wayfarer

My point is that if there is no scope to explain experience in any sense, or even clarify what it means, then its not actually clear what the implications of this are in terms of a complete explanatory model of the world. And you seem to keep saying that explanation isn't the point, you don't want a different explanation, you just want physicists to read Husserl for some reason I cannot fathom.

Tremendously powerful, no question about it - but the mind that devises these abstractions has been left out at the very beginning. And then, the attempt is made to put it back in again, by attempting to put it on the same ontological footing as the objects of that method. That's the category mistake at issue. — Wayfarer

There is a time and place for phenomenology. If you are interested in the chemical composition of the atmosphere on a distant planet many many light years away, why would you be interested in the phenomenology of what you see when you look at your instruments or data back home one earth? Its not relevant to the particular explanation at hand. Ofcourse, in a manner following from Kuhn, we can and should give cognitive and social accounts of how science works, but that should not necessarily be conflated with the topics or goals of these sciences.

That article I linked to is called 'the blind spot of science is the neglect of lived experience'. And really I don't think it even registered. It's like 'what "blind spot"?' — Wayfarer

Well maybe you can elaborate on what this blind spot is about and what implications it has.

You can't articulate what it means, because of the physicalist framing of the issues. — Wayfarer

You can't articulate to me what redness is. This is not a physicalist issue. Absolutely no one can do this. This is why there is a combination problem in panpsychism. Whatever Husserl is doing, he is not solving this issue. And if you can point to a field of enquiry that is doing the things you want, I don't understand the issue you're having. Why not let physics do physics and phenomenology do phenomenology. And the breadth of human knowledge is probably great enough that you have various fields that sit somewhere in the middle.

Here, you're falling back on scepticism - 'nobody really knows anything'. — Wayfarer

Its very simple; explain to me what redness is. Convey to me in words that will give me that information. You simply can't. Our communication about experiences is analogous to the Wittgenstein box-beetle thought experiment, and this has nothing to do with physical explanation.

Surely nobody can describe the feeling of pain such that another on hearing that description will know that particular pain, but everyone knows what pain is, because they suffer it. That is the 'explanatory gap' in a nutshell. — Wayfarer

Alright, so you understand what I mean. But if no one can describe the feeling of pain. Then how on earth can you give an explanatory account of pain?

it marks a boundary to what physicalist explanation, by its own lights, can reach. — Wayfarer

But I don't think this is an issue for physicalism; this is an issue for any kind of possible explanation. No theoretical framework can account for what it is like to feel something. A panpsychist or idealist is not going to be able to explain conscious experience anymore than a physicalist; panpsychism and idealism will also both have gaps in explaining how experiences emerge, such as the combination problem.

That is precisely why this has been called the “blind spot of science” — the systematic neglect of lived experience as a condition of intelligibility rather than a phenomenon to be explained. — Wayfarer

Experience may be fundamental to knowledge and explanation in the sense that they can be seen as the information that cognizing organisms utilize, manipulate, predict; but under pains of circularity or dogmatism, that organism will have no articulable explanation or description of it. All explanations and descriptions are relational and predictive; physical explanations are nothing more than a special case that lays out such relations without being able to elucidate "intrinsic" natures of reality. No other form of explanation can do better.

Knowledge and epistemic behavior may be realized within one's experience, but I believe you are assuming that the only meaningful account of realism is through a God's eye perspective. I disagree, and think that realism through a perspectival lense is at least permissible from a deflationary perspective on truth / realism. There is then no conflict between purported realism about physical explanations and the fact that the intelligibility and realization of explanations and descriptions is effectively entirely through our experiences.

That the experiential cannot be given an explanation then suggests that there is no blindspot - which might be emphasized if at somr point we can give computational / information-processing account of the meta-problem of consciousness (i.e. give an account of information processing limitations that cause intelligent information processing agent to hit a brick wall when it comes to accounting for certain things that it perceives or processes, related to what it would call experiences). The blindspot is then only apparent if you think that explanations can do more than give predictive or relational accounts and should be about God's eye perspective; but they simply can't, and there are strictly no unique preferred descriptions either in any God's eye objective sense. If no explanations tell you about "intrinsic" nature of experience, and you can have realism without God's eye perspectives, then there is no conflict with physicalism, which simply excludes alternative reductive accounts like substance dualism that are mutually exclusive to physical explanation.

What is mind-boggling about the hard problem is present in all perspectives, and in my opinion the only reason people feel they need to shift from a physicalist account is because they view physical explanations as aspiring to be explanations of God's eye "intrinsicness", which in my opinion is simply not what physical explanations do and not what any other explanation can do either. No other account can then do better in principle when viewing realism and explanation in a way that does not aspire to some kind of idealized God's eye perspective about "intrinsic" stuff. Being unable to explain experience is no different from being able to explain any other purported "intrinsic" nature of the world that cannot be given an explanation or captured intelligibly due to things like Munchausen trilemma with regard to information processing.

I think a central issue of the mind-body problem is that we take experience as some kind of special ontological primitive when I can't even articulate what that means. I can't even give a non-circular explanation of what "ontology" or "being" means (something which more deflationary attitudes to truth are less likely to have a problem with, imo from what I can see). I then don't think the fact that I see things necessarily further entails much else about the intrinsic ontology of reality becausr doing so would be going beyond what I can really say or ascertain about my own experiences. I can't even elaborate on what it means to say that I see things. I just know that it reflects some causal structure in the world at some scale.

And I think this kind of rejection of prematurely attributing properties to experience is what illusionist are actually advocating for - they are not saying that experience doesn't exist, but that seeing things doesn't entail some extra-elaborate ontological account, let alone a dualistic one. The illusion isn't the experience itself but the ontological account people might be prone toward (e.g. that there is some extra substance out there). And the inability to articulate about experiences is evidence that an ontological account of experience is fruitless, imo. The illusionist will then want to explain our difficulties in explanatory accounts of consciousness as being a consequence of information processing without trying to imply something profound about "intrinsic" reality. But ofcourse, being agnostic or even rejecting the role of "intrinsicness" in explanations preserves the role of physical sciences in our web of knowledge whilst revoking any apparent need for additional and mutually exclusive explanatory accounts (e.g. a theory of substance dualism or Kastruppian idealism) which we have no evidence for.

I might be tempted to make a statement like "what "ontology" or "being" means is to have a Markov-blanket" which would mean ontology is scale-relative and informational. I would want to make that statement because its hard to escape the intuition that to be having experiences suggests there is some very vague sense in which reality does not have a preferred scale. But I am not sure this assertion makes "intrinsic" nature of reality anymore articulable, and I am not even sure about the validity of the intuition motivating it. Because my tempted statement doesn't really address what I think of as the "intrinsicness" issue, its not clear that it is that helpful beyond reasserting a trivial fact about nature that systems are nested inside each other as we zoom out.

But if physicalism is perspectivally realist grounded by something like a deflationary notion of truth, not on explaining "intrinsicness", I am not sure there is any sense of a blindspot that physicalism misses out on that is not missed out by any other perspective. Physicalism just asserts the position of physical theories in articulable explanations about the universe, our web of knowledge also including many non-physical things also.

** Extensive editing for (possibly more my own) clarity

Physics shouldn’t bother with consciousness; metaphysics shouldn’t bother with time dilation. — Mww

But I don't think metaphysics can bother with qualia either. There is no way of articulating about redness and no possible explanation or description you can give from anyone's perspective, physical, metaphysical, whatever

But his argument is that when you appeal to atomic structures. neurons, brains, or other elemental entities, your thinking is always operating in terms of gestalts — Wayfarer

But there's nothing stopping someone from modelling why thinking may or may not be like that in terms of computational models that may model brain architecture. The only thing in cognitive sciences that is in principle not amenable to the kind of explanation a physicalist might like is experience / "qualia".

This comes across all the time in your posts. — Wayfarer

I just can't really comprehend the idea that events at larger scales of reality are not scaffolded upon events at smaller scales.

Kuhn — Wayfarer

I fully agree with Kuhn's analysis though I think it is permissible to talk about realism in a sense considerably weaker than the kind of realism it is implied Kuhn is often arguing against (though obviously he may not agree that weaker forms of realism should be considered realism).

The idea that physicalist accounts can go only so far and we should refrain from overstepping their explanatory power. — Punshhh

For me, nothing can fill that gap. No one will he able to give a characterization of the intrinsic stuff talked about in the Chalmers' quote of my previous post. And this is just the nature of how descriptions and explanations work in an information processing system like a brain, imo. There are inherent limitations such as described by the munchausen trilemma.

If what it is like to be something can be taken as a directly aquainted example of irreducible ontology, then it seems ontologies strongly emerge macroscopically.
An issue is that if all our conscious behavior can in principle be simulated and reproduced from models of functioning brains, this emergent ontology seems not only epiphenomenal but also disconnected from our own reports about our own experience which would be due to the brains - this seems incoherent.
For me, the most logical explanation is that any strong emergence is an illusion (and there is no scientific evidence for it anyway) and we actually have no intuitive, coherent sense of the fundamental "intrinsic" ontology of the universe, partly because of limits on how any intelligent system can work.
When I think about this stuff, it always invokes the imagery of the strange loop and munchausen trilemma that really be escaped from.
The closest kind of fundamental "intrinsic" ontology I would pick would actually probably be something like informational (e.g. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33286288/), but I don't even actually know what that actually really means; the generality of the concept is appealing, that is all.

In my brand of physicalism, I will agree with my own claim that I am experiencing something, just that to say that I am experiencing something doesn't add anything to the p-zombie account. But the subtlety is that my p-zombie account just is cataloging the way we describe the universe in our theories. The theories don't talk about intrinsic natures in the sense as described in Chalmers' book "The Conscious Mind" (pg. 153):


"physical theory only characterizes its basic entities relationally, in terms of their causal and other relations to other entities. Basic particles, for instance, are largely characterized in terms of their propensity to interact with other particles..Their mass and charge is specified, to.be sure, but all that a specification of mass ultimately comes to is a propensity to be accelerated in certain ways by forces, and so on. Each entity is characterized by its relation to other entities, and these entities are characterized by their relations to other entities, and so on forever (except, perhaps, for some entities that are characterized by their relation to an observer). The picture of the physical world that this yields is that of a giant causal flux, but the picture tells us nothing about what all this causation relates. Reference to the proton is fixed as the thing that causes interactions of a certain kind, that combines in certain ways with other.entities, and so on; but what is the thing that is doing the causing and combining? As Russell (1927) notes, this is a matter about which physical theory is silent."

At the same time there would be no duality between intrinsic stuff and physical stuff because the physics is just relational descriptions of events in the intrinsic stuff. You could add a separate consciousness stuff next to the intrinsic "physical stuff" and get dualism. The passage I quoted is in a section about panpsychism which would be the alternative where the intrinsic "physical stuff" is actually just consciousness. My view is that the last option would not really be meaningful. I have no coherent characterization of what conscious experience is or means in a similar way to how physics is silent on the intrinsic nature of things.

but it also commits us to a very specific kind of explanation: one where wholes are derivative, and the only truly fundamental realities are the constituents and their interactions. — Wayfarer

Well, no because you can use any level of explanation you find convenient for the task or the part of reality you are interested in.

When we identify something, we identify a gestalt, not an assembly of simples. This is a basic fact of cognition.

A gestalt has properties that no list of constituent parts captures: unity, salience, meaning, intentional relevance. — Wayfarer

And this is just a certain level of explanation in the realm of psychology, where these concepts may have some utility whether on a formal or informal basis, or fundamentally inaccurate/accurate. But that doesn't invalidate the possibility or validity of explanations from the view of neurons as units of information-processing. That doesn't invalidate the fact that if these psychological constructs belong to an organism, then it also belongs to a biological structure made of cells and molecules and fundamental particles, the excitations of quantum fields. There is only one way you can make consistent the plurality of a person, an organism, a brain, a many-particle quantum system, existing within the same vicinity. With appropriate assumptions, we can just see all these characterizations as different ways of looking at the same system at different scales. But if different scales exist, it implies that descriptions on one scale under appropriate assumptions are due to appropriate coarse-graining of descriptions on a smaller scale. I don't see how you can get out of that, it doesn't really work the other way round.

The point is that the reductive strategy that works for chemistry or planetary motion is not obviously suited to phenomena whose defining characteristics are holistic, structured, and inherently perspectival. If explanation bottoms out in simples, yet consciousness and cognition are inherently gestalt-like, then either: — Wayfarer

The thing is that the only difficulty here in psychology is qualia. But there is no problem for anything else. People create computational models to explain perceptual phenomena, cognition, behavior all the time, and these models can be based around neuronal-type architectures. And maybe at some point computational models will also be able to give us insights into neural or information processing correlates of reports of our own experiences like "gestaltness". No you can't explain experiential qualities, but I see nothing stopping anyone in principle from giving causal explanations to our behaviors and reports associated with those experiences. And thats all really science wants to or needs to explain. What a psychological or neuroscience wants to produce is a working p-zombie, because that would give you everything you need to know about why behaviors happen, including meaning. Because to me, meanings can be nothing more than our behaviors and reaction and predictions concerning things we see in the world, similar to but more general than the idea of 'meaning is use'.

Here, you're committing the 'mereological fallacy'. This is central to an infliuential book, The Philosophical Foundations of Neurosciences, Hacker and Bennett (philosopher and neuroscientist, respectively): — Wayfarer

You see, I think your approach is undermined by this reductionism, the conviction that basic physical level is the only real one, to the extent that you can't even consider any alternative. You simply assume that philosophy must defer to physics, as if that can't even be in question. — Wayfarer

The problem is that you like to reify concepts to the extreme where they should not be mixed or made to touch. Whereas I think we are looking at the same world through a plurality of tools.and concepts at different scales which are different but nonetheless will overlap or inform about each other. And we should make use of tools and concepts when there is explanatory interest in doing so.

Someone can identify someone else as drunk in a completely in formal way with no scientific training or definitions, and the drunkenness is simply a property of what someone sees in someone else's behavior. That doesn't mean that the chemical structure of alcohol and how it affects a brain is not relevant to explaining what someone is seeing and characterizing in a different way under a different perspective. They are all windows onto the same world that are interlinking.

Similarly, I can talk about our explanations and descriptions being limuted by the brain because there is good empirical reason to think that is the case. If I were to inject a excitotoxic chemical into your right hippocampus that destroys your neural tissue, it will be associated with a dysfunction in your ability to think in certain ways even though "thinking" is quite an abstract, nebulous phrase that probably is easier understood in the daily conversations of people and their own experiences than from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience.

I just don't understand this kind of pedantry which spits in the face of blatant facts about how biology relates to experiences. We should be using the full range if concepts and explanations to talk about the world so for instance we.can have experiences as one level of description on one hand related to our daily lives, but we can also talk about the very same systems, organisms, people in terms of brains or how brains affect experiences, behaviors, reports. It seems that I am actually advocating for the complete opposite of what you think I am - usign the full range of conceptual tools and explanations to alk about things. But that doesn't change facts that when you zoom-in onthe region of space in the vicinity of your body and head, you will find neurons, molecules, the validity of physical descriptions that can be causally connected to how we experience and see things.

Its very hard for me to see how one can argue that levels of explanation on a larger scale are somehow not less fundamental compared to descriptions on smaller scales where you zoom-in. I don't think it even makes logical sense. Like its fine to say that we have two different explanations on two different scales describing the same part of the universe, and these two explanations are just different, maybe incomplete, maybe difficult to link together - like say a mundane description of an economy or game of cricket or religious ceremony vs. a physical statistical mechanical description of the physical interactions in an entire city or in a game of cricket or a religious ceremony. But its difficult for me to look at these two descriptions on even terms. There is an asymmetry there somewhere between the more abstract descriptions on a larger scale vs. the smaller scale one.

I see omly one way to make descriptions at different scales consistent if they exist in the same universe. That doesn't mean we need to restrict ourselves to one fundamental level of explanation all the time.

The issue is that nothing tells you about or can articulate an "intrinsic" nature of things. Its not a specific issue of physics. Neither is it a specific issue of consciousness. In a p-zombie universe with no consciousness, physics doesn't tell you about the "intrinsic" nature of things anymore than it does in any other universe. Nonetheless, this p-zombie universe doesn't seem problematic for physicalism because articulable explanation seems to be exhausted by a hierarchical knowledge framework we have accumulated as humans where the physical sciences have a certain position in the hierarchy with regard to the description or more specifically the prediction of actual events that happen in the world.

Metaphysics is about articulable descriptions and when we get to the notion of "intrinsic" natures we can say very little that is not circular or very primitive and non-descript like "dualism is false". I think various kinds of positions on anti-physicalism kind of assume that descriptions and explanations come for free most of the time. But I don't think this is the case. All description and explanation occurs in some kind of context where there are limitations or constraints, ultimately shaped by how brains process and use information. If you no longer think explanations should come for free, I don't think you can be sure anymore that the ineffability of something like experience is [not] intrinsically linked to epistemic constraints as opposed to reflecting something fundamental about nature.

But then one has to also be mindful about what it means to say that explanations or descriptions or scientific theories are real within their own epistemic constraints. And there's no question for me that certain areas of knowledge will come with things like "strange-loops" which are fundamentally due to the limits on how information can be processed.

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And I think you would find the physicalist would not allow that the mind and brain are conceptually seperable as that would imply dualism, — Wayfarer

No, I think most physicalists can acknowledge the conceptual separability between mind and brain, as well as a whole bunch of other conceptual distinctions in the vicinity of the same topic.

The physicalist wants to claim that when you zoom-in on the world and un-mix the convoluted causal structures, then you will find that everything is grounded in more fundamental events or structures describable and predictable by physics, and you will find no additional stuff behaving according to different principles. This doesn't invalidate conceptual distinctions, it just recognizes the hierarchical structure of scientific theories and the fact that no other competing theories describing mental substances exist or even plausibly exist that have any testable consequence.

My brand of physicalism is silent on the exact "intrinsic" nature of the world because that concept doesn't really have any articulable, consequential meaning or implication for anything other than being a kind of placeholder in one's metaphysics - scientific theories are descriptions that predict the behavior of the world as we see it. But I don't think that we need an articulable characterization of the "intrinsic" nature of the world in order to reiterate what I say in my second paragraph. In some ways then, this brand of physicalism is more like a family of scientific hypotheses against the kind of hypotheses that substance dualists would present.

Notice that experience is exactly as inarticulable as notions of "intrinsic" stuff. There is then no inherent or at least articulable contradiction between the ineffability of consciousness and the kind of "intrinsic" nature of the world that the physicalist would scaffold their descriptions on. A panpsychist would use the inability of physics to characterize "intrinsic" natures of the world as a gap where one can consistently inject consciousness.

My view instead is that if the inarticulability about "intrinsic" nature of the world and inarticulability about experience are indistinguishable, this shouldn't lead us to say that the intrinsic nature of the world is consciousness or experience, rather it should lead us to say that when we talk about experience, we are actually talking about something that is fundamentally underspecified and we don't have any conceptual structure to say anything meaningful about it or say what it it is other than something like it reflects a kind of informational structure grounded in some more fundamental causal structures when you zoom-in. This doesn't necessarily make it different from any other structures in reality, and the ineffability of consciousness is not distinguishable from (in)articulating about "intrinsic" natures regarding any other structure.

Nonetheless, given that consciousness is fundamentally grounded on brains for which we have various tools to describe their behavior, there is scope to examine why it is that we can or cannot articulate about various aspects of information in the brain, which might be linked to things like munchausen's trilemma, self-referentiality, primitive or indecomposable concepts, constrains on what makes a good representation, coarse-graining, the conditoonal-independence regarding Markov blankets, and limits on the determinacy of sensory processing, the inherently enactivist albeit predictive nature of description (e.g. language-as-use). This would also be linked to our inability to easily reduce qualitative experience to physical explanations in the same way we can with other more abstracted spatial structures we can identify when we see things.

One may be able to say that there is something that it is like to be a kind of structure in reality but there are strong limits on what this sentence can possible mean about an "intrinsic" nature of reality, and there is no necessary conflict with the hierarchical structure of scientific theories (with structures described by physics occupying a certain position) and any possible limits they have in explanation (such as the reasons in the above paragraph).

You have to realize that Wayfarer's brand of anti-physicalism is very different from yours. You are positing that there is something like a mental stuff and a physical stuff that are inherently different.

It can be confusing talking to Wayfarer because often he speaks as if this is what he is also suggesting, but he isn't. All he really wants to say is that we should not explain everything with physical concepts, and emphasize that non-physical concepts are defined non-physically. But even a physicalist can and I think generally does engage with concepts this way and so what he is arguing for is not philosophically interesting.

When you do end up probing Wayfarer on what he actually thinks about deep fundamental ontology, he will not endorse the kind of radical beliefs you do. He stays agnostic on that kind of thing and just says things like "the world beyond our senses is not as it really seems" or "We cannot engage with the world without concepts we have created", but he is never going to commit to a kind of substance dualism even though he sometimes speaks like he does. And he says he is not going to contradict accepted scientific consensus. He rarely tries to make it explicit that he is not actually a substance dualist or Kastrupian idealist. All he wants is to not conflate non-physical and physical concepts, nothing more.

Need I point out that this is not the Physics Forum? — Wayfarer

No idea what you're on about

And, you haven't countered the argument I put to you — Wayfarer

Which argument?

What about the boxed quote above in support of materialist theory of mind. Do you think it is basically correct? Or if not what’s wrong with it? — Wayfarer

Physics only predicts how things behave. Physics doesn't tell you about an "intrinsic" nature of things, and I dont think this is necessarily a barrier to a physicalist perspective. Given that, I dont think I should have any expectation that physics should tell me about what its like to feel something. The inexicability of qualia is not specifically anything to do with physics, it is inherently irreducible, inarticulable, and ive always thought that the brain itself and how it processes information will actually also give insights into why we cant articulate some things about the information we process and why we can articulate certain other things. This would be connected to the meta-problem of consciousness.

What you're arguing is, look, we have ideas, we can grasp numbers and logical laws, but the brain is physical, these ideas are 'instantiated' in the physical brain - therefore ideas have a physical basis or cause or dependency. Even if we can't really grasp how neurological activities give rise to ideas because of the brain's complexity, you think this allows you to say that they're still physical in principle. This is 'neural reductionism'. — Wayfarer

All I care about is whether the following is true:

"but the brain is physical, these ideas are 'instantiated' in the physical brain - therefore ideas have a physical basis or cause or dependency. Even if we can't really grasp how neurological activities give rise to ideas because of the brain's complexity"

If you want to say that math is about abstract relations not strictly about specific objects with enduring identities in space and time, thats fine. But as long as the quote or something like it is reasonable, I don't need to appeal to anything else additional or mysterious to ground it. I have in principle my story of where that comes from and that uses or even thoughts abput math are grounded in physical events. The rules of math don't come from, would not be derivable from more fundamental physical processes themselves. They are consequences of those physical processes performing inference about the structure of a world an organism exists in.

If I am not saying that the rules of math can be derived from the physical processes that underwrite cognition, and I am not saying we even have the capacity to model a human doing math yet, then I think its not necessarily the kind of neural reductionism you talk. But what it is saying is that there is nothing else mysterious or magical or dualistic or platonic going on, nothing other than brains performing abstract inferences about structure in the world.

Consciousness never encounters its own brain. — Wayfarer

This doesn't seem much different from the fact that experientially I will never encounter or pick out an individual electron. That shouldn't stop me from saying they are there. Neither do I see any reason to say that the richness of my experiences are a kind of functional structure occurring within the vicinity of my brain.

The reductionist view basically abstracts the brain as a physical object, tractable to neuroscience, because that is the way that neural reductionism has to see it. That is why it is 'reducing!' It wants to reduce the rich, multi-dimensional reality of lived experience to the equations of physics, which have provided so much mastery over the world of things. But in so doing, it has forgotten or lost the subject for whom it is meaningful. — Wayfarer

Your view seems to think there is some weird mutual exclusivity here when there isn't. You can think of the world is physical and talk about the richness of your own experience, study phenomenology, talk about existentialism, meditate, take LSD, listen to the Doors.

It in no way can be described in solely physical terms. — Wayfarer

Yes, and I have no desire to describe the majority if things in terms if fundamental physics.

And I am starting to suspect that your view is about to become uninteresting. What i interesting is something like substance dualists, not the claim that we shouldn't describe everything in terms of fundamental physics. Its uninteresting because I think most people don't take that view, even people who think of the world as fundamentally physical.

Furthermore, there's a sound argument for the fact that space and time themselves are manufactured by the brain, as part of the means by which sensory data can be navigated by us. — Wayfarer

Space and time are inferred. If we were arbitrarily constructing space and time then there would be no reason that it should help us navigate sensory data Space and time are structure of the world we infer througj sensory data.

There is one universe where all events and things we see occur in physical space-time. We can have descriptions, explanations of structure at various levels of abstraction about what we see, but they are all instantiated by and inferred by brains which are things in physical space-time. There is a distinction between what those things are about in terms of what we see out in the world, and how they are instantiated. Maths is not about brains, it is about abstract structure inferred in what we see in the world, the rules of math are about that abstract structure; that does not mean that how we use maths and the reason we are able to do math is not instantiated in brains. Logical necessity is not about neural tissue, it is part of abilities to talk about abstract structure we see in the world. But this does not mean that this ability and why it comes about, how it works, is not instantiated by, realized by neural tissue and physical stuff using descriptions which themselves invoke different levels of explanation and abstraction. In this way a physicalist can accomodate the "non-physical" nature of logic whilst maintaining a view where all events in the world are still essentially and fundamentally supervening, or something like that, on physical descriptions which themselves are articulated in exactly the same "non-physical" structures you are talking about.

Physical causation is that in which every sequence in a causal chain can be described in physical terms - gravity, energy, combustion, reaction, and so on. — Wayfarer

Using abstract objects of math, just like how describing what neurons do uses abstract formal language of math that cannot be idenitified as objects fixed in space-and-time, but instead emergent abstractions nonetheless used to describe physical events at various levels of abstraction from particle physics to cosmology, chemistry, physiology, ecology, economics, social science, sports science.

(like 2+2=4 or geometric axioms) that hold regardless of any physical event. — Wayfarer

And is exactly the language usex to describe physical events.

a mental state like pain can be realised in many different physical ways. — Wayfarer

There is no point here unless you can give an example of where these things are not being realized by physical systems. This kind of thing isn't interesting because its a generic feature of complex systems. Like the physical description of waves is multiply realizable because analogous wave descriptions exist for many different media. Biological anatomy is multiply realizable because animals can do things like fly in many different ways. Im sure there are countless examples of emergent physical patterns realizable by different media. This is not interesting. What is interesting is the idea of stuff in this universe fundamentally instantiated in and realized by something that is not physical. Like mental substance.

The model and the actual mechanism aren’t the same kind of thing. — Wayfarer

Yes, and this point is not really powerful because when you try to make separate them out cleanly... you simply can't. Physics is meaningless without math. The position you are attacking doesn't recognize the distinction you're making. Someone who is a physicalist and appealing to explanatory reductionism to physics and similar things is appealing to these abstract mathematical tools as descriptions. You can't articulate anything about anything without them; people are going to acknowledge that what constitutes their intellectual paradigm is descriptions, tools and constructs that they use to model what they experience. Acknowledging that doesn't invalidate their position. Stripping naturalism of math or any other descriptive tool is meaningless, and the efficacy of naturalism or physicalism would be in terms of those very tools. They are part of the identity, the explanatory power, the meaning of reduction. You can't tease them apart.

The fact that we use constructed tools to describe things and the idea of foundationalism or pulling a paradigm up by its own bootstraps has no consequence on whether that paradigm is explanatorily effective; the paradigm just needs to be successful at predicting or modelling what we see, at least in principle. And the plausibility of this latter point leads to the chain of reasoning that physics describes the behavior of chemical systems which mediates the behavior of brains which mediates all our intelligent reasoning and logical behavior. We can describe this behavior in terms of the mathematics of inference just like we use various mathematical tools for describing things, and really there is no fundamental difference between the kind of math that describes how neurons or brains can perform certain tasks compared to math used in areas of physics, especially statistical physics, or other fields like economics.

We can have different levels of explanation using different tools, but they then also do something like supervene on each other in principle. I think in fairness, this "in principle" thing is an assumption when met with the incompleteness of science; but at the same time, there is no obviously convincing knock down argument against it especially considering that incompleteness doesn't mean completely uneffective. The only proper motivation against it imo is the irreducibility of experience but my take on that doesn't really threaten the "something like supervenience" concept I am talking about.

But that research presupposes the very norms it’s trying to naturalise. — Wayfarer

The point is that you can't separate them. Neuroscientists conceptualize and model brains in terms of statistical learning and inference. What you are saying is like claiming that physics is unsuccessful because you can't pull math out of 'physical stuff' by its bootstraps. But the physics to some extent is the maths, the maths is the description of the physics. Similarly, a complete neurobiological description of what brains do, how they do it and how people behave cannot be divorced from the math, or models of statistical learning and inference. They go hand-in-hand with the "naturalised" explanation. No one is trying to "derive logical necessity from neural activation patterns"; the caricature of naive reductionism you attack is not probably not very common at all.

In short, physical processes are governed by causal relationships; reasoning is governed by norms of validity. The latter can't be reduced to the former. — Wayfarer

This distinction doesn't make sense because people use formal models of reasoning to understand what the brain does and then map aspects of that to physical architecture. So when it comes to computational neuroscience, these two things you say are irreconcilable are actually inextricably entwined.

:up: :up:


Maybe not but probably not that relevant to the disagreement.

:100: :up: :up:

Vague, oversimplistic, poorly motivated ideologies that claim to solve all our problems like this are distractions from actual problems and actual solutions, imo.

That's only a problem for those that posit that intentionality is fundamental. — noAxioms

:up: :up: :100:

But why does that association exist at all? Why is there a link between a specific pattern of neural activity and a specific type of conscious feeling, one that consistently fits the body’s needs? — tom111

I understand this, but it seems like this question is nothing above the hard problem of consciousness - why do we have experiences, "period". Personally, the issue of psychophysical harmony then has little content beyond the basic issue of subjective experience.

Why does consciousness map onto physical and behavioural organisation in such an orderly, adaptive way, instead of being random or disconnected? — tom111

To me, it wouldn't make sense otherwise. If experiences are purportedly about things, connected to a "law-"ful physical universe, then how could they appear random or disconnected, it seems undermining. It seems to me that if experiences were hypothetically not "lined up" to the world, whatever that means, you wouldn't beable to sensically perceive this.

As kind of my own devil's advocate (because I am not sure I would actually seriously entertain this issue or way of framing things full-stop), rather than saying that experiences are somehow coincidentally "lined-up", it feels more sensical to me to say that the irreducibility of subjective qualia renders them arbitrary, and it is in fact the functional aspects which make them seem coincidentally "lined-up", when really they are arbitrary. I don't see how you can make a clean divide between experiences and functional aspects because all the observable consequences of my experiences on myself, all my attempts to understand them, involve inherently a functional aspect that renders them sensical (e.g. like how reporting on one's own experience is clearly part of the functional realm of our own behaviors).

What does it mean for an experience to "mirror" or "match" physical and functional organization? This seems to be somewhat similar to Chalmers' "hard problem of consciousness," — SophistiCat

I was going to say the same thing. I first heard this phrase "psychophysical harmony" on his podcast (which was good but seems to have stopped running) and I just didn't have any inuition about why this is an issue or that there is something to be explained about why pain feeling is linked to certain behavioral responses or stuff like that. The idea that your pain could feel any other way such that it is some how mis-matching functional responses doesn't even really make sense to me because it seems to me that the perception of something as pleasent is inherently entangled with functional responses or dispositions unless you perhaps you have some kind of brain damage. There doesn't seem to be anything additional in this issue beyond just the general hard problem of consciousness, imo.

The moment such a statement is made, it leaves the purely formal domain and enters the empirical one — Wolfgang

Well, no imo because its a description of what the maths says. Its directly analogous to variational principles of least action in physics which don't specifically have empirical content because they are formal tools that are used to describe lots of different things in physics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_principles

a framework so flexible that any observation can be redescribed post hoc as free-energy minimization. — Wolfgang

But this is the point. Free energy minimization gives you a framework where you can write down the equations describing the conditions for a system to maintain its own existence over time. That might not be interesting for a rock. But I think thats quite interesting for more complicated self-organizing systems. Its a framework for describing what complex self-organizing systems do, like choosing to describe physical systems as following paths of least action.

If organisms truly sought to minimize surprisal, they would remain in dark, stimulus-free environments. — Wolfgang

To avoid this absurdity, the theory must implicitly introduce meaning — assuming that the organism “wants” stimulation, “prefers” survival, or “seeks” adaptation. But these are semantic predicates, not physical ones. Hence, the principle only works by smuggling intentionality through the back door — the very thing it claims to explain. — Wolfgang

False. A system will have wants or preferences or seeks things out because if it doesn't it dies. And the point of FEP is that any system that continues to exist looks like it is modelling its environment. Things like preferences are an inherent part of that model and are necessitated. It comes for free. Nothing is required to be smuggled in.

Hohwy concedes that FEP is better seen as a framework than a theory. — Wolfgang

Yes, and Friston sees it the same way, I have been saying it that too. At the same time brains and what brains do in terms of constructing models and fulfilling the predictions of an organism is clearly a corollary of complicated systems that need extremely complicated forms of self-regulation in order to continue to survive. And we can use more specific, testable models of predictive processing or similar to describe what brains do.

it is a semantic conflation. — Wolfgang

Disagree, it is a rigorous mathematical framework with provable claims whose central, general claims are provable. Obviously, with regard to brains, it makes no specific predictions. But as a unifying theory of self-organization, it does exactly what it says on the tin, and its impossible for it to be any more precise empirically because the notion of a self-organizing system is far to general to have any specific empirical consequences. Exactly the same for a "general system's theory". Nonetheless, this theory is fundamentally describing in the most general sense what self-organizing systems do, and gives you a formal framework to talk about them which you can flesh out with your own specific models in specific domains.

what they literally mean;
if they are literal, they presuppose an experiencing subject. — Wolfgang

As I've said before, this isn't because theories are invalid. Predictive models to describe neurons are testable and can replicate single neuron responses. They are doing exactly what they should in an effective way.

The issue is you want them to describe something else. And thats fine, but no theory in neuroscience has ever claimed to explain subjective experience, nor do they want to. Thats not the most interesting part of neuroscience.

That is precisely what renders it incoherent. — Wolfgang

Nothing incoherent. Its a mathematical framework you can use as a tool to describe self-organizing systems, and it can be put to effective use for many purposes. This is an interesting one I have cited before:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.21217

I take the point that on its own FEP is not a theory of consciousness (and I am talking in the easy sense, NOT about subjectivity), because it is too general, but I think it can have an important role in the hierarchy of different ways, different theories of describing what brains do as living, self-organizing systems. And I think the generality is a positive because it necessarily acknowledges that you will never find strict boundaries or dividing lines between conscious and non-conscious, living and non-living, and I don't think you can have a full account of these things without that acknowledgement.

Edit: spelling and crossing out

This generality immunizes it against falsification and therefore removes it from the domain of empirical science. — Wolfgang

I don't think this matters if you treat it in the proper sense as a conceptualizing framework. If you can have testable theories at a lower level, then there's no issue. Its like criticizing mathematics for being unfalsifiable when thats not the point of mathematics. Mathematics can be used as a tool for the purpose of describing scientific theories.

I think at the core, you are thinking about Friston's theory in terms of subjective experience. This is not what it is about in any sense.

The category error is yours for thinking a theory or principle is about something that it is not intended to be about.

You cannot speak of “prediction” or “inference” without presupposing a model that experiences something to be predicted or inferred. — Wolfgang

I don't think this is true. Yoy can describe a single neuron as doing predictive coding. I don't think most people believe we need to ascribe them with experience. You might say "prediction" or "inference" is the wrong word because in your head they are somehow connected to qualia, but thats then just semantics that has no bearing on the validity of models or what they intended to do.

This raises the simple but essential question:
What is Friston’s theory actually for?
What does it allow us to know that we did not already know?
If it is neither empirically testable nor conceptually coherent, it remains a formal metaphor — a kind of mathematical cosmology of life that explains everything and therefore nothing.
A theory that can be applied to all systems explains no system in particular; it produces not knowledge, but only a symbolic sense of connectedness. — Wolfgang

It is a conceptual framework in which you can give things a formal description. I would say the benefit is conceptualizing how the world works, just like what philosophy does in general. Philosophy doesn't necessarily provide us with new knowledge about the world, but it people use it to organize their concepts of the world in a self-consistent way. As a mathematical tool it provides a choice for how one can describe systems they are interested in, like how in physics, there are usually different formulations of the same theory. None of the formulations predict anything different, but they are different perspectives on the same thing.

And I will emphasize it is "conceptually coherent" in your specific sense of the phrase if we are not talking about qualia. Because thats not what its intended to do and what most neuroscientific theories are not about. We are dealing with the easy not hard problems of consciousness. In that sense, any of these theories from neuroscience can be fully consistent theories of consciousness (in the easy sense). They are not intending on solving hard problems.

A real theory of consciousness must instead explain the transition from physical stability to autocatalytic self-reference — Wolfgang

I think it is worth noting there is obviously a continuum between inanimate and animate living things, with no strict dividing line. It is then unlikely that there can be a single, unique theory of living things or consciousness due to this because any such theories will have to make arbitrary distinctions about where living things end and non-living things start. Clearly then, a theory which fully encompasses the continuum must be maximally general, but that doesn't mean it is mutually exclusive of other theories of increasingly less generality. We shouldn't be looking for a single unique theory that explains everything. We need a plurality of tools that describes phenomena at various levels of generality from the highest to lowest.

If it does not, it becomes irrelevant to the problem it is most often cited for. — Wolfgang

Again, the category error is yourse because the theory can be used for things and many papers have been written using it to construct models that are even compared to data. The category error is yours in thinking that it is meant not for those things but explaining phenomenal consciousness. The theory is being used for all those things it is good at in those papers. It is not being misapplied, you are mislabeling it.

they are principally unverifiable — Wolfgang

No more than any other scientific theory. I mean, the reason why predictive coding (as a specific machine learning architecture) became popular is because machine learning architectures were designed that described actual neural responses. So this theory can be empirically evaluated as much as any other scientific theory in the sense that you can build models and test them.

Now, Friston's free energy principle is a mathematical principle that is unfalsifiable and much more general than any specific theory about the brain...

but specific kinds or families of predictive processing models for what neurons and the brain do are obviously testable, which is what I am talking about in the first paragraph.

From “organisms behave as if anticipating” it does not follow that they literally minimize epistemic uncertainty. — Wolfgang

But as I already explained, this is a crucial point of Friston's theory. He is not saying that organisms have some intentional uncertainty minimization thing they do. He is saying that in order to exist, they have to look like they are doing that. It doesn't matter how that is achieved, which is why his theory generalizes across many domains. Evolutionary natural selection can be framed as free energy minimization.

Sliding between these domains without a strict translation rule is a category error. — Wolfgang

At the highest level of generality, Friston's theory is more of general mathematical principle that can be shown to be the case generally for complicated systems regardless of the specific way they are described.

In this paper, he makes a great deal of effort to connect his principle to physics - statistical, newtonian and quantum mechanics - to emphasize the generality of the description as applying to random dynamical systems of which fundamental physics might be seen as special cases.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.10184

The relationship between free energy minimization and stochastic systems was shown before even Friston started his idea: e.g.

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=17970774975628711245&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1


So the category error you accuse him of doesn't hold because the theory is much more general than you suggest.

subjective experience — Wolfgang

This seems to be your main issue, which is fine because these theories aren't meant to solve the hard problem of explain subjective experience.

I clearly didn't read the quote properly because re-reading it I think its not that far from my view, broadly. Maybe not identical, but not really fundamentally that disagreeable. I am just quite allergic to the way that passage was written so it put me off reading it more closely.

Just the manufacture seems to defy any tech. Can't say 3D print a squirrel, finish, and then 'turn it on'. Or can you? Best I could come up with is a frog, printed totally frozen. When finished, thaw it out. Frogs/turtles can deal with that. Again, I am mostly agreeing with your side of the discussion with Joshs. — noAxioms

Well, you won't know just by looking at our technology. We don't know what technology will happen or can happen. Its speculation. But I said if we had the technology to do something. I think that the ultimate limit is what the laws of physics would allow you to do, what can be manipulated, which seems to be quite a lot. I remember people give examples that if you smash a glass on the floor and see it smash everywhere, there is nothing in Newtonian physics that says the reverse process can't happen: i.e. lots of sprinkles of glass from all directions gather up on the floor into a perfectly formed glass then bounce up into someones hand. This is a completely physically acceptable process; it can happen under Newtonian physics even if the initial conditions would be very difficult to produce. It just needs a method (or technology) to produce the initial conditions. There's a lot physics might seem to allow you to do in principle if you get the conditions correct, the technology to produce those conditions. But at the same time, such processes will still remaon physically acceptable in principle even if it is very difficult to get those required conditions together.

Yes , that’s what I thought. So that indicates a distinctly different philosophical perspective on human and animal
cognition. My perspective to closer to enactivists like Evan Thompson: — Joshs

I mean the quote doesn't seem distinctly enactivist to me, but more focused on the inability to explain qualia. At the same time, I can clarify that I didn't mean anything about qualia or experience in the previous post, I only meant behavior, as I mentioned in the first sentence. I just struggle to find any motivation for the sentiment that in principle physical mechanisms cannot explain all behavior, partly because that claim would entail some radical revisions to what we know about the universe that I think we should probably be more aware of by now.

Edit: and I should probably clarify more that targeting behavior specifically was due to the p-zombie thought experiment I described which is about the threat of epiphenomenalism.

You’re saying you think you and I are approaching our understanding of human and animal cognition from the same philosophical perspective? — Joshs

Broadly, yes.

And what does our disagreement over relevance pertain to? — Joshs

When I came into this thread I was talking about the hard problem of consciousness and the plausibility that physical mechanisms can produce all human behavior. The point was that I don't believe there is anything in the field of neuroscience or A.I. that produces a doubt about the idea that we will be able to keep continuing to see what brains do as instantiated entirely in physical interactions of components as opposed to requiring some additional mental woo we don't yet understand.

Everything I want to argue for and against concerning what a.i. is and can become is already contained with my dfferences with you concerning what humans and other animals are doing when they think. — Joshs

I don't think there is any fundamental difference here between what I think about what humans and animals do, I think the disagreement is about relevance.

Given their trouble even producing a manufactured cell from scratch (a designed one, not a reproduction of abiogenesis, which is unlikely to be done), you wonder if it can even be done in principle. — noAxioms

Well this is then just a speculation about technological capability, which I referred to conditionally.

Given that the thinking of our best engineers doesn’t even represent the leading edge of thinking of our era, it’s kind of hard to imagine how their slightly moldy concepts instantiated in a self-learning a.i., will lead to the singularity. — Joshs

I don't understand this sentiment. It's not a refutation of the possibilities of what can be created, neither is it a realistic sentiment about how the world works. Things change, ideas advance, ideas bleed over between different fields. Doubt anyone in 1950 at the time could tangibly envision technologoy that does what A.I. are doing now.

The fact that the architectures of our most self-organizing machines depend on locking in certain grounding concepts to define the parameters and properties of self-organization ( properties which will change along with the concepts in a few years as the engineers come up with better machines) means that these concepts are in fact forms of hardcoding. — Joshs

And this would apply to all living organisms: jellyfish, plants, the many kinds of brains, neural webs, etc, etc.

1. what does this have to do with prediction — Wolfgang

I mean, informational entropy is a central part of Friston's theory.

2. what do you want to do with such a general statement — Wolfgang

I'm just correcting your assertion that organisms need to know how to calculate probabilities.

I think its a nice framework for examining self-organization and conceptualizing what living organisms and brains do.