so it is not we who construct, but we who are constructed from moment to moment — Janus

Semantics really, isn't it?

There is no self!

but that means no more than that imagining ourselves having been different involves no contradiction. How can we find out if it is really possible? — Janus

Well you start to get into a slippery slope here because modality is something we make use of all the time whether in daily life, intellectual discussion, conceptualizations etc. This kind of skepticism, while very fair, is also I think is an argument against all your thinking, not just in this discussion.

On the otherhand, I could just ask you whether you think you could use the operation quus. Yeah, I'm appealing to the same kind of modal quandry but I would be surprised if you said you were unable to.

There's also examples on real life where people categorize concepts differently, like colours in different cultures. Of course, some Amazonian tribe will see the same colours as us, but they will categorize them differently, which is essentially the crux of this problem.

It seems obvious we can interpret what we observe in different ways; that is different people can. Or one person may be able to imagine other possibilities than those which are simply found to be the case. — Janus

Yes, and what is in question is whether there is a fact of the matter about who is correct.

Depends on what you mean by arbitrary. There is a reason we tend to label things in a certain way and its to do with how our labelling and descriptions are literally physically, mechanically caused by a complicated brain that has evolved to infer statistical structures in our sensory inputs and learn.

Maybe in that way, it is not arbitrary, because our brains have evolved to do a certain thing, they do it well and, and there tends to be similarities in what human brains do, whether as due to social influences or without those influences.

At the same time, does this mean our concepts could not have been otherwise, for what ever reason? I don't think so. Is our brain not an arbitrary structure which could have been different in some way and so learned concepts differently? yes. Those concrpts are obviosly motivated by what we observe, just I don't think it doesn't mean we can't interpret what we observe in different ways in principle

Even just the fact that people can come up with ideas like quus shows that there are arbitrary ways we can define, construct, draw the boundary on things. We might think of them as unintuitive but I think that kind of reasoning is as arbitrary as the concepts themselves.

I'm afraid this "separate ontological being" makes no sense to me. If you do believe in such a realm, surely you are back to something like a Cartesian dualism

Yes, I don't believe in that. There was a typo. Should have been : "But that doesn't mean you believe..."

But that doesn't imply the former are physical or even that they are caused by or embedded in the physical.

How else can you conceptualize your thoughts though without some form of dualism. We live in a universe explained by physical models that explain models of our brain which functionally explain in principle our entire mental lives. Even if you're agnostic about ontology or hard find it an inherently noncoherent concept like I would, these things are hard to ignore. Its very powerful. Its much more than a parallel relationship I think; they aren't really even because the mind just isn't anywhere independent of the brain in any meaningful way.

But that doesn't mean that the emotional state is physical

Well it really depends what you mean but my purpose really isn't to kind of re-engineer all our concepts into physical one. But again, even if it is not a physical concept, those feelings we have are inherently to do with our brains.

You might say; "Ah ... but the physical observables are the real thing!" However if you did that, you would be denying your own subjective experience as real because it isn't observable (by any normative meaning of 'observable'), even by you.

I don't think its about making a choice between different things being real, its about the explanatory options open to us, and where they lead, which generally goes toward the brain and computational theories etc.

For Physicalism to be up to the job ...
Expand it's conceptual repertoire to include psychical concepts ... but then it no longer falls under any normative definition of 'Physicalism'.

Again, I think this is just implying a naive kind of physicalism which i dont believe people endorse generally. Its like saying that a physicalist shouldnt take a field like psychology seriously or accept its concepts. Its like saying that anyone who accepts psychology can't be a physicalist. This is obviosly not true. Again, just because we have experiential and psychological concepts, doesn't mean we don't want to in principle exain them at some level thriugh physicla models without requiring any other kind of dualistic notions. Thats all I'm really saying ... I think.

Hope that mind can eventually be explanatorily reduced to (not just mapped onto) physical concepts ... but you and I don't believe that's possible; a long history of scientific 'failure' casts a severe doubt about the possibility; and I think it is logically incoherent.
If one of these get-outs works for someone, fine. But the cognitive dissonance is not to my taste.

I just disagree with the idea that, in order to be a physicalist, you have to believe that everything needs to be reduced and explained in some precise, neat, final way. I think we are limited observers and there can be in principle good physical or informational or computational explanations for the limits of what we can and cannot explain. We may not be able to explain everything, we may not be able to have finalize coherent fundamental ontologies about the universe. But I think within what we can explain there is just this centrality by which everything seems to revolve around and which we describe as the physical. I look around the rooma nd see physical things, I think about where my experiences and thoughts come from and think in terms of the brain. etc etc. we have come a hell of a long way in learning how brains and minds work.

I don't think rules are imposed, they describe behaviors — Janus

Yes, that's what I said, you must have interpreted impose differently. But my point is we construct those descriptions.

Sorry, late reply. Ideally I would like to think of myself as having an anti-normative stance philosophically, generally anyway. I'm not really sure what rationality is and think it probably means various things in different contexts. I think it is probably something that follows conventions more than we think, is fallible. What is rational depends on what people's preferences are too, in the sense that you might not look at someone rationally if you cannot even see what end they are trying to meet, or perhaps even if youre just a staunch believer that acts need "useful" ends.

I think what I just said is trying to get at a kind of rigorous version of what rationality is but then again I don't think that really has much to do with common sense rationality in daily life. As I said I don't even know what rationality is really but its a very intuitive concept in daily life.

If what we do seems to be the product of these kind of blind processes as Wittgenstein seems to emphasize in Philosophical Investigations, then it will never really matter how we explicitly characterize something like this because life, society must go on anyway and constraints on what is "good" or "rational" will inevitably emerge in a self-organizing way, whether we have a proper understanding of them or not. I don't think there can be any strong objective notion of rationality though.

Once you concede that a purely physical stance is insufficient, how can you be a physicalist? I agree entirely that 'physical' needs a lot more work to define it, but whatever the definition is, it seems to me that there will be aspects of life which physical concepts don't account for. If you can actually provide a sufficient definition of the physical, then you have solved the Hard Problem. — Christopher Burke

Because this is to say that your conceptualizations are the same as your ontology of the world. For instance, everyone believes in feelings which you might label "love", in everyday life peopke may not be able to or want to characterize that physically. But that doesnt mean you dont believe in a universe where there is something called love floating about with its onwn separate ontological being to physical things. Its still something that is embedded in the physical very much so. The fact I can make a conceptual separation is just trivial.

I think the crux here is the implicit assumption that physical = real. — Christopher Burke

No I think its about needing something more than the physical to explain reality. Yes obviously we have things above physics like biology and aocial sciences bit they all seem to be grounded in the physical.

- Physical representations keep changing. 19th century physicists would have said the world is really made of atoms. Modern physicists would regard that as simplistic and have recourse to the much more epistemic concepts of fields and information. Has fundamental reality changed as we've changed our theories about it? A bit implausible. — Christopher Burke

Again, its about needing something more than these models, regardless of what those models say specifically.

Reality, since we have good grounds for assuming it contains conscious agents, is more complex than solely physical concepts can handle — Christopher Burke

I don't really understand what extra things would be needed to explain conscious agents above things related to the natural sciences, math, computation, information theory etc.

But that mode of representation is insufficient to represent all of life as experienced. — Christopher Burke

Well this is fair but I think it is also in some ways a straw man because most people who say they are physicalists will not have some kind of naive physicalism where they believe the only way to describe the world is with physical concepts. Of course we can talk about organisms, the weather, love, sport, green... whatever.

Maybe it refutes physicalism in thr way youre thinking about it but I think most physicalists would find that characterization of the issues extremely trivial. I could come to the point of [3] coherently by this type of thought process but then when I look around, what do I see? The world is full of physical things and everything seems to be grounded in the physical, even my consciousness with respect to brains.

I have actually said earlier in the thread that technically I shouldn't call myself a physicalist but i keep finding myself on this side of these debates which just reflects my intuitive leanings as opposed to a rigorous ontology.

A more rigorous view would note the difficulty in defining "physical" coherently but then I think this is going away from what motivates the physicalist perspective: that a functioning model of how the world works doesn't require dualism or some separable phenomenal machinery to it that is independent from our physical models. There is nothing else to explain about consciousness.

This just shows a misunderstanding of what is at stake imo. It is clearly obvious that in general, people do not have a problem in performing coherent behaviors that help us fulfill goals and desires in the way we want. The point is that describing this behavior and its "rules" is chronically underdetermined, chronically indeterminate. It is clear that we do not perform behaviors in a top down way as a consequence of explicit conceptualizations of rules. Rather, rules are post-hoc classifications and inferences we impose on our own behavior. Our behavior and our abilities arise in a completely implicit, automatic fashion; they are the product of complex neuronal processes that are completely hidden from us and can endow our thought and abilities with a Humean kind of arbitrariness which we often don't stop to take the time to notice. People in A.I. often talk about the problem of interpretability where by our machine learning programs chuck out solutions which are difficult for us to understand or we have no idea how it came to the solution. They can do things in ways that from our perspective seem very non-linear. I think the exact same happens in our own cognition and brains, which should not be surprising given the fact that a brain is just a big machine learning architecture. I think we often consider our own cognition human interpretable because we explain concepts in terms of other concepts which our brains have already chucked out but look at the Munchausen trilemma in philosophy: this approach doesn't go very far.

If someone could prove you were doing quaddition it would equally defeat the point of the thought experiment in the same way that proving someone can do addition would.

I think 'reducing' should be confined to when one is accounting for a thing by referring to that thing's subparts. — Christopher Burke

Yes, this is what I have been talking about all along. But at the same time, a reduction is a special case of a correlation in the way you're talking about. You have two different representations, the original one and the reducex one and you are creating a mapping between them which is as you would describe a correlation.

No physical concepts can be applicable to the phenomenal image. — Christopher Burke

I don't think any concepta can be to be honest, and in light of that, I don't think you can say the physicalists picture is more flawed in another. There is no alternative kind of more complete picture I think.

When I am talking about reduction here, I am talking about an explanatory relationship. If experiences are purely representations or information about trees, then why should these representations carry information (that can be explained by) about brain states. Trees are the way they are totally independent of my brain. Trees have a shape that is nothing to do with my brain. If I then explicitly represent that shape information, that shape information should have no information about the inside of my brain in it.

Which indicates the most coherent categorisation of the human condition (I believe): we are what-it-is-like-to-be our representations. A bit of reality representing those bits of reality we encounter, including ourself. — Christopher Burke

Yes and I think we cannot know what that what-it-is-like bit really means as I believe you suggested somewhere earlier

Better to see it as correlating parallel representations — Christopher Burke

Well I think this is more or less what reducing is when we believe that this correlating as cogently justified under some context. Now the question is whether there is some justification for reducing the tree to a brain. There is some sense in which it can be because there is a mapping between information in the outside world and your brain states which is physically mediated (i.e. by travelling light, surface reflectance properties, receptor stimulation and neural potentials). However, this isn't the same as the mapping when I construct a description of a tree. The physical mapping aforementioned is incidental since the tree itself is independent of my brain and the physical means information is carried to my brain. The question is, why when I am trying to desceibe a tree, the description I get is my brain. Given the independence suggested just now, there is no actual reasons. Trees are not brains and are totally separated. If my experiential states are representations of trees that map to components of trees, there is no reason why I should be able to examine my experiences and find that I can reduce it to brain activity, because my experiences are simply not about my brain if they are not representations of it.

Its interesting there's this impression that Kripke has misunderstood Wittgenstein or not even attempted to but I find Kripke's interpretation more or less aligns with what Wittgenstein seems to say throughout the book imo. Maybe I am misinterpreting it towards my philosophical inclinations though (but I don't actually believe that).

That's not just a reflex ... — Christopher Burke

Not saying that cats necessarily have analogies but I think these animals are much more complicated than people give tjem credit for and this dichotomy between human deliberation and reflexive animal instincts is not correct

how is it possible to know "what trees in the outside world are made of"? Surely we only 'know' our constructed biophysical representations of the observed putative bit of reality we have labelled as a tree. — Christopher Burke

Yes, this is more or less what I mean. We infer constructs in the physical science from those perceptual representations so that those constructs explain properties of those representations. Its more or less circular in that perceptual representations should only be reducible to things thay share the properties of those representations, things which have those properties because they have been directly inferred from them. The point is that trivially it shouldn't really make sense to reduce it into something which is not itself. It would he a weird world if that were possible or at least cogently defensible.

To know/experience is to represent. So we cannot logically claim that reality is physical, psychical, informational, whatever. All we can do is represent it in convenient ways depending on our purposes, and all these modes have their uses. — Christopher Burke

Yeah, I do make this point in a couple other posts on this thread. As some other posters have pointes out, it is difficult to make physicalism into something cohesive and coherent.

Nonetheless, I think what motivates people who intuitively think of themselves as or defend physicalism is I think the central role of the models we construct in the physical sciences and how other models, constructs, things fit around them. When I look around me in the world... physics. But turns out, making this into something useful or tangible is difficult. I have started to think that maybe physicalism, naturalism, other similar ideas perhaps are often adopted in opposition to, in reaction to ideas of dualism or that there needs to be a separate mental thing because there are things that we find difficult to explain. So maybe it is often adopted without a coherent ontology in mind but is like an anti-dualist stance. I dunno, thats just a thought.

But, we need a system in our brains that is effective to organizing the outside world's as manifested by our sensations so that the species can continue to reproduce and propagate their genes. It is a process that involves many factors that intersect to — Justin5679

Well you've just evoked the motivation for that part, ha!

I think this is a fair point that I overlooked: if one were to “not follow their intuitions”, that may actually help them navigate the world. However, upon further reflection, this is a paradox (which annihilates it as a possibly viable alternative) principle, as in order to follow it one would have to intuit that it is true that they ‘should not follow their intuitions’; but if that is true, then they should not ‘not follow their intuitions’; but if they are intuiting that as true (which they would have to to accept it), then they should not not ‘not follow their intuitions’...ad infinitum. They would not be able to operate, which is means no knowledge of the world whatsoever. — Bob Ross

I may actually have to go back on my agreement on this one because thinking about, someone might be able to just formulate a more specific rule which tells them when they should and should not follow intuitions, which may avoid this.

So, for me, I don’t think this kind of reasoning is sufficiently elaborated on by saying “follow your intuition”--as, for me, that sounds like all levels would contain intuitions. — Bob Ross

This is fair I think.

They would not be able to operate, which is means no knowledge of the world whatsoever. — Bob Ross

Yes, agreed. I guess I do kind of agree with you on this point in the way you're putting it now, I think I was just thinking about the notion of "objectively best way to get knowledge" in a different way beforehand which I would be more skeptical of.

Rather, I mean that when explaining a set of data (about reality), do not extraneously posit entities (as it is superfluous and corresponds to nothing confirmable in reality). — Bob Ross

I still think I disagree profoundly on this one. If it is not about picking the correct explanation then I don't see an obligation to pick the more pasimonious explanation that would be independent of some further contextual details.

I do not merely mean intuitions but, rather, all forms of evidence (which includes intuitions). — Bob Ross

Yes, fair. I don't think this changes my interpretation of what was said however since I was explicitly thinking that we accept or reject evidence in a way which has recourse to intuition so I was actively envisioning both of these being subsumed under "follow your intuition".

It is an inevitable rule that we must follow if we want to know the world as best as we can. — Bob Ross

It seems to me most likely the only coherent way of approaching knowledge but if it doesn't necessarily give me knowledge I don't see it as objective. If someone has particularly bad intuitions then maybe a different rule would give them knowledge better.

and it isn’t that evidence is purely ‘intuitional’ — Bob Ross

I think my point thought evidence being intuitional is that if you look at some evidence and accept it then ask yourself why you accept it, it leads to intuitions eventually. You may have a reason why you think that evidence is good, but then ask yourself why that reason is good, and then the reason for that reason and so on... I feel like it would just end up at intuitions and so in a sense, everything we do here is on some level driven by intuition.

Like I said previously, strictly going against one’s intuitions will almost certainly lead to accepting that which is false. — Bob Ross

But my point is that it depends on the context so I can't say it is objective unless I rule out that alternative contexts (e.g. having awful intuitions) are possible, which I cannot do. There will be contexts when going by someones intuitions will be counterproductive too.

Because it claims to know extraneous information about reality, since it deploys extraneous explanatory entities to explain the same data about reality. It is purely imaginative and non-factual “knowledge”. — Bob Ross

I think the notion of parsimony I'm more used to is about what seems most parsimonious choice between some options so it is in some sense a subjective thing and not really about factual knowledge. The way you have described it just now seems to be more or less equivalent to "just pick the correct explanation" which is a bit redundant since you don't know what that is. Who knows maybe what you thought was the most parsimonious explanation may turn out insufficient under further evidence which would be an example if the rule not working out.

I don’t think this works, as you are saying that if it strikes you as the case that the counter-evidence (which would change your mind) was true, then you should do the opposite and thusly not change your mind. I don’t see how one would be receptive to evidence if they always have to negate their intuitive reaction to the situation, as they would be obligated to never accept counter-evidence that they would normally accept. — Bob Ross

I was assuming a separation between one's initial intuitions and the process fo evaluating evidence but this is a good point that they could converge in the sense that accepting or denying evidence would rely on intuition.

However, at the same time this conception seems to be viciously circular in a way that almost defeats the purpose of framing the question the way you did when it could have been done simpler - just follow your intuition (because I am using intuition to accept or reject evidence also - or perhaps you could frame it as "follow your intuition and then when you get an intuition that this last intuition was wrong, follow the new intuition"). I don't see how this could be an objective rule though as your intuitions could be faulty and never lead you to truth, never lead you to accept the correct evidence or interpret it in the correct way. It presupposes something about our intuitions which may not be objective; in fact, in a scenario where we have no reason to think our intuitions are very good, including intuitions about evidence, going against intuitions may still be as effective a way to find knowledge.

I agree that it makes very little sense to not follow your intuitions in the way i described above in the bold part, and it makes little sense to something like take up a belief which you believe to be wrong. At the same time, just because this is the only really coherent way to go about looking for knowledge, doesn't mean it objectively gives us knowledge.

If they both explain the same data, then it is extraneous to accept the more complicated theory: it is just superfluous and, thusly, there is no legitimate reason to accept it — Bob Ross

But so what? Some people may have a preference for superfluous explanations. Why does that matter if a superfluous one is just as good at predicting what we want to predict as the non-superfluous one?

but I do think that it is a factor for ‘knowing the world’ better, if that makes any sense. — Bob Ross

Yes, I think almost everyone wants their beliefs to be logically consistent and not to actively select inconsistent models or views of the world.

I actually think I more or less agree with a fair amount you talk about in the last two posts you make about information and the "arms-length" separation of observer, though maybe I would describe it in different language. I definitely do have a different perspective but there is definitely stuff I agree on, I think.




I thonk you are begging the question by presuming dualism, presuming some separation that needs to be explained. My belief is dualism is false and so there is nothing to be explained but at the same time, there's nothing stopping me from having concepts of both the mental, the physical, or various other things.

Are you saying that taking what doesn’t strike you to be the case as the case would be equally legitimate as doing the contrary?

Yes, because at the end of the day, aslong as you are receptive to evidence and change your views based on that then it should lead to the same result.

Of course, what one thinks is necessary could be different than what another thinks, but that is not of concern for this principle itself. — Bob Ross

Yes, but why should one have to use parsimony if a non-parsimonious explanation is just as good? If the non-parsimonious one gets the job done, is there really a requirement to use a more parsimonious one?

True. But if you believe something with higher confidence than something else, then why would it ever make sense to, when in conflict, take the less confident belief as true over the more confident one? This seems irrational to me and clearly not a good way of ‘knowing the world’. — Bob Ross

Yes, true it subjectively doesn't make sense to take the less confident belief to be true but then if you are mistaken about your high confidence beliefs then this practise will systematically give people wrong answers.

I will grant that it doesn't actually make sense to go against this principle but at the same time this principle is not guaranteed to give you knowledge.

but its usefulness, to me, says nothing about its truth — Bob Ross

This is fair ; I am probably just less inclined tp believe that there is a strong line here between truth and models or that even truth is something that we can access beyond the restrictions of employing models.

Well the way I stated it in the OP was meant to just be a counterargument against irreducibility so that a physicalist could use it. But I think my view here is mostly just an argument against dualism. I don't think I am truly a physicalist, and clearly from various replies in this thread it can be seen there are some deep issues with turning the intuition of physicalism into a cohesive viewpoint but its the kind of intuition or view that reflects well on my sympathies so I often put myself on that side in a debate that can very polarized.

At the same time, as I have said in several posts in the thread, I also don't think we can have access to a good characterization of what a fundamental ontology could be. In light of this, I don't think my view of reality has a real base, it is just filled with the models we have from the natural sciences and how they relate to each other; my inclination then is that embracing ontologies centered around experience add to this network of models in ways that are either not necessary or not very interesting/useful from my standpoint.

I feel like my views don't need something more to explain existence because it appears to me from various areas of philosophy and neuroscience that as observers we are just naturally limited in how we can think and characterize the world and so there are just things about existence we cannot have epistemic access to in a coherent way. We cannot ever look at the world in a way that is independent of how our brains have been structured, the things that they are capable of doing and their limits.

Edited: paragraphing, "intuition of physicalism", "have epistemic access to"

1. Intuitions (i.e., intellectual seemings): one ought to take as true what intellectual strikes them as being the case unless sufficient evidence has been prevented that demonstrates the invalidity of it. — Bob Ross

Obviously your intuitions may be wrong but it also seems to be that I could apply the opposite rule and it wouldn't necessarily have an effect on how well I gather knowledge.

2. Parsimony (i.e., Occam’s Razor): entities ought not be multiplied without necessity. — Bob Ross

I just don't see why this needs to be the case. I can imagine someone applying this and it turning out that the correct option had more entities than they woukd have deemed necessary.

3. Coherence: the belief (in question) should cohere adequately with one’s higher-prioritized beliefs about the world. — Bob Ross

Your higher-prioritized beliefs may be wrong.

4. (Logical) Consistency: there ought not be logical contradictions in the belief nor in contrast to higher-prioritized beliefs. — Bob Ross

This one I agree with most and is most intuitive of what we want to do but at same time maybe sometimes we do hold inconsistent models about the world which nonetheless are useful.

That may be, I just thought that these rules would have to work all the time to be objective but I can imagine scenarios where the rules you suggest would sometimes would fail.

Its not about generating consciousness but the idea that if something putatively non-experiential can generate experiential concepts, this leads to absurdities which make dualism implausible. P-zombies are an example of such absurdities. Of p-zombies are biologically identical to us they will say they have consciousness and have thoughts on the hard problem of consciousness even if they don't have experiences. This is absurd which can then be used as an argument against dualism.

Yeah and how about that theory? How does it "arise"? "What" is it that is "arisen"? — schopenhauer1

Well I am just talking about the concept of qualia and the inability for some kind of statistical learning machine to explain their own concepts; for instance, because those concepts are too primitive and they are representations which do not carry information about how those representations are instantiated. For instance, if you look at how some neural network works where input units cause states of hidden units to change through weights and thresholds etc, you might consider the network to learn about information in those inputs but theres no viable mechanism that would allow it to learn about and represent how that information is instantiated.

That's only one form of dualism and even that is not entailed in physicalism. Physicalism doesn't have room for mental events other than hidden dualism (has been my premise for a while). — schopenhauer1

The point I'm trying to say there is that it would entail epiphenomenalism and epiphenomenalism is absurd so it cant be the case. It may allow some form of dualism where the physical and mental interact but i generally find this implausible because there is just no evidence or suggestion from science that this is or should be the case.

I think that isn't much of an argument other than we don't know. That is again, only one form of dualism, and it's one that's prone to physicalist accounts because it starts with the physical causing mental. — schopenhauer1

Its not an "I don't know". Dualism is either not empirically motivated or incoherent. This incoherence can be seen in the idea of a p-zombie which says it is conscious and believes in the hard problem of consciousness.

Emergence does have to be explained here. How is it that emergent properties exist prior to the viewer, and all that. It's bald assertion to just say that "and it emerges", it's about as explanatory as saying, "it's an illusion". — schopenhauer1

Emergence presumes dualism which I am not doing. I am saying there is no dualism.

Its all about the meta-problem of consciousness. If it is plausible for a physical statistical learning architecture to generate experiential concepts but be incapable of reducinh (correction) them to its knowledge of the physical world then it seems to render the role of phenomena in our knowledge of our own consciousness as epiphenomenal and absurd. The idea that a representation would not carry information about what physically instantiates that representation is one suggestion about why some kind of statistical learning architecture would not be able to reduce or explain experiential concepts it might generate.

My view isn't so much about falsifying qualia but about whether our concepts of qualia and their irreducibility can plausibly arise through information processing. If that is the case then it strongly suggests to me that dualism is an illusion because it would entail epiphenomenalism which is absurd. On the other hand it suggests one might be able to defend the identity between brain processes and qualia even if one cannot be reduced to the other. This would allow a physicalist to defend the notion that everything is physical, or more specifically that nothing extra is needed to describe reality.

I don't see the problem. It seems to me that under your characterization, physicalism would be falsified if there existed any concepts that were not physical: e.g. organisms, economies, mountains. They are all just labels that describe our empirical observations at different scales nd levels of abstraction. I can think of an observer the same way, I just mean more or less something that can respond differently to different inputs. That seems to be the kind of minimal characterization of information processing.

What do you mean?

I don't think there is anything problematic in entertaining both the mental and physical as concepts that we have constructed due to the nature of our brains.

In hindsight I think is-ought was a poor analogy/description for what I meant which was just that there doesn't seem to be a straightforward link between the evidence you accumulate and your decision to take up a belief.

In what sense would you say your norms are objective?

I think though that fundamentally, our natural sciences seem to characterize the nature of the universe with physics in a way that doesn't depend on the notion of experience. It is not needed for those models to work and would be adding something in addition which isn't required and doesn't make a difference to our understanding of the universe. I think therefore physicalism is more appropriate than panpsychism.

Thus, while we can abstract the picture from the photograph, and we can say that there are isomorphisms between different copies of the same image, these are causally irrelevant. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This doesn't violate causal closure due to the fact that everything about the world we create are models or constructs which depend on various contexts. The fact that I can create various different models of the world at different scales and levels of abstraction doesn't have a bearing on causal closure in this context.

I think people's characterizations of physicalism are generally quite vague which is why so many people are intuitive physicalists despite this criticism you gave which would trivially refute the strict characterizations of physicalism you and perhaps many other philosophers give it. I would look at physicalism more in terms of how central our physics models appear in our view of the natural sciences and therefore the world which is totally coherent with the idea of having various levels of abstraction.

Information is another abstraction and any notion of information depends on the ability for an observer or detector to make distinctions; information is therefore not really a thing but is something that can be characterized in the interaction between a stimulus and observer / detector. What this means is that any notion of information would be at least implicitly embodied in the physical processes that enable an observer to make distinctions (e.g. so that I can recognize a photo or a neuron can selectively respond to different inputs): the information is physical, just not in any way independent of an observer.

Physicalism says that everything that can be known about seeing red is physical. There is nothing else. Perhaps experiencing red is a different experience than knowing "how red is experienced." This is fine, but it's going to lead you to physicalism with type or predicate dualism (which may or may not be physicalism depending on who you ask).

The thing about what you're saying is that it suggests that our notion of ontology about reality should be limited by our inherent capacity to perceive or think about it which I don't think is the case. The fact that I can conceptualize reality with both mental and physical concepts or that there are limits to how I can directly perceive reality should not necessarily be confused with reality itself.

In fact, I can plausibly imagine a completely physical world where you have a physical machine which receives sensory inputs about the world, learns their statistical structure and creates theories about the world. I can totally imagine trivial contexts where that machine would be incapable of explaining aspects of its own inputs and reconciling them with its own physical models... would that entail the physical world exists in has things that are not physical? No, its just the limits on what a machine can explain.

If physicalism isn't going to fall to Hemple's dilemma and define itself as "just whatever currently has evidential support," it seems like it has to pick a hill to die on, and superveniance is the most obvious hill.

To be fair, I think similar sorts of problems show up for idealism — Count Timothy von Icarus

As said in a previous post, I think that the idea of fundamental ontology is inaccessible to us, perhaps cannot be made coherent. My characterization of physicalism is more about the role of our models of physics and I guess the natural sciences more generally
in our view of reality and arguing against the need to posit ontologically separate mental phenomena above and beyond them.

This just restates the problem that is supposed to be revealed. — schopenhauer1

I disagree because the problem as usually is seen as telling us about ontology, and I am rejecting that view. The disparity in her concepts or in the types of information she perceives should not necessarily be equated to facts about the world of the world. This would assume she has direct access to the world, which she clearly doesn't because she is only capable of knowing or perceiving what she does because of the specific structure of her brain and how it interacts with the world. I think this is enough to say that her conceptualizations and knowledge cannot be seen as being objective.

And let's not dwell on Mary, I just mean the implications of any of these thought experiments. That is to say, it's not about the information processing, but why it is that the information processing is accompanied by "what it's like" qualities. That is to say, a zombie is basically behaving internally (neuronally) and externally (outward movements) just like a normal human, except there is no visuals, hearing, etc. — schopenhauer1

For me, the purpose of the zombie thought experiment is that the idea that there is some separation between "what it's like" qualities and information processing is totally incoherent. If this were the case then it would render "what it's like" qualities totally causally redundant since the zombie with no experiences knows everything about the experiences their non-zombie counterpart has and comes out with the same philosophical quandries about the hard problen of those experiences (even though it doesn' have any). It makes no sense as it would mean that even though I am seeing and experiencing things right now, those visceral "what its likes" have no bearing on my knowledge and my reports about my own experiences.

At the same time, if brain activity is the cause of my reports and knowledge but is only caused by other physical causes then how am i getting knowledge of those disembodied experiences that are inherently different from and don't interact with the physical. The fact that my experiences and also my knowledge of those experiences line up is totally coincidence which seems absurd and requires a convoluted way of conceptualizing how reality works. This is a much deeper problem than simply the irreducibility of consciousness - another word for it is epiphenomenalism and it just seems totally an incoherent way of viewing how reality works. The simplest solution is that the separation between "what it's like" and information processing doesn't really exist - there is no duality.

Why do we still think of there being some inherent difference? Because our information processing apparatus makes us think there is; afterall, we do not have direct access to what the world is really like. I think a lot of philosophical thinking in this area seems to assume that we just have direct access to things but I don't see how this can be the case when our thought, perception, concepts depends directly on our brain. I don't even think we should assume that just because we experience something we have direct access to knowledge of what is actually going on. Why should we assume this kind of thing comes for free? Does it come for free for cats, insects, fish? I don't think our brain structure or perhaps even any type of brain structure can allow us to satisfactorily answer the question of "what" is mental event X. At the same time I think we can deduce logically that a fundamental dualism between the mental and physical could be illusory.

Yes, the physical description doesn't entail knowing what red is like and vice versa but notice how her saying "aha, I know what it is like to see red" is caused by brain activity which is causing her motor neurons to fire and let out those words. It is photoreceptors and neural activity as a consequence that allow her to even see red. Clearly, the only reason she knows what red is like is because of her biology.

Now imagine a p-zombie Mary, identical in every single way biologically except for the fact she does not have experiences. She hasn't got certain kinds of photoreceptors so she.. or her biological machinery at least... cannot distinguish wavelengths of light at all. She suddenly gets gene therapy which allows her to produce the pigments necessary to distinguish wavelengths of light ... "aha, now I know what its like to see red!". Zombie Mary is going to say this because she has identical Biological machinery to normal Mary even though she does not even have experiences. Not only that, but because she has the same biological machinery, the causal dynamics of brain activity is going to lead her to say things like "I cannot reduce these colors to the other physical facts I know about the world". Zombie Mary is going to know everything that Mary knows about her experiences without even having them. Without even having experiences she might be able to evem understand and anticipate other people's experiences... tell them that they will find a particular picture beautiful or that a perfume smells of a mix between strawberries and roses, which other people would agree with.

Isn't it strange that Zombie Mary knows all these things about experiences without having them. Does Mary actually having experiences make a difference to her knowledge of those experiences which come about due to neural activity? It doesn't seem so. Why would Zombie Mary find that experiential concepts are difficult to reduce to scientific concepts when she doesn't even have experiences?

This picture of a Zombie Mary is kind of incoherent in that a Zombie Mary knows all about experiences and Mary's actual experiences seem to have no causal effect on what she knows or even reports about her own experience. What this picture tells me is that even though Mary discovered something new, this has nothing to do with a novel thing appearing before her eyez but about changes in her brain. The reason why she might not be able to reduce this experience to physical concepts is similarly to do with the brain and the nature of the information the brain processes. I think this is closer to the idea that Mary gains a new ability rather than learning a new fact about something novel that exists in the universe.

The only way to make the picture coherent, so that Mary's experiences are not redundant when it comes to her knowledge of her own experiences, is to collapse the dualism between physical and mental. Her experiences and neural activity effectively must be the same thing to respect the fact that her experiences are causally efficacious but also that her biology is clearly what causes her information processing abilities and accounts for her knowledge of her experiences. The irreducibility we find then doesn't reflect an ontological distinction because clearly her seeing red for the first time isn't about a new different kind of thing to the physical. Instead, it is of an epistemic nature in the context of information processing in the brain/mind; she has physical and mental concepts which are constructed in a certain way, but these are concepts created effectively through statistical machine learning in her brain to understand what she perceives; they don't necessarily reflect the actual intrinsic nature of the world. She cannot perceive the intrinsic nature of the world that is independent of the particular structure of her senses or the brain/mind she that receives information from it.

Intriguing! I have at times thought about conceptualizing reality in terms of information. I think I have quite a way to go before I can consider myself to have a precise well-thought out kind of manifesto about what I actually believe about reality or how I should view it. Still have to think out a lot of kinks.

And yes I agree with you in the sense that I don't think its necessary to get rid of a divide between mental concepts or the notion of experience vs. physical ones.

I think maybe there is still a kind of something like an is-ought problem in epistemology in the sense that people may have different amounts of evidence regarding some hypotheses but the fact that I have evidence doesn't follow that I should take up one belief or another. Some people may take up a belief on very little evidence and some on a lot more.

I think Mary's Room is a very good argument against the reducibility of experiences to physics but I don't think that it entails that this is because experiences are some kind of thing out in the world being missed out on.

I would expect that in principle we can derive Mary's reaction of "aha, now I know what it is like to see red" from a complete physical description of her brain processing. If her ability to see color is mediated by physical photoreceptors and physical communication via neurotransmission then her new knowledge of red is due to physics, not some unique experiential thing like qualia which she has a kind of special ability to detect. Similarly, her inability to make the reduction from red to physics is something that is a consequence of her brain activity and the type of information she is processing in that activity.

Her new knowledge of red then may not be a physical fact in the trivial sense that it is not part of her understanding of physics, but it is not necessarily a consequence of something about reality that is being missed in a particularly significant way. What she can or cannot perceive is a direct consequence of physics.