So mathematics models the world because the world exhibits regularities that can be mathematically described, not because the world is constrained by the mathematical framework. — Wayfarer

I think this is Jha et al.'s thesis, pretty much. It's the world's (causal) regularities that permit math to function as part of an explanation. A different world, if there could be such, would reveal different regularities, but the role of math would be unchanged.

Personally, I believe that irreconcilable differences between quantum physics and classical physics will be resolved with a proper explanation of consciousness. — Harry Hindu

I have the same hunch. Ever read The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose?

I don't know what "appearance to a mind" means. It seems to imply that a mind can be independent from some appearance as if something appears to a homunculus in the brain. — Harry Hindu

I know, the right language is hard to find. What I think we want to describe is the subjective event that occurs when, say, I think of a purple cow. The image of the cow is rather like something that "appears to a mind" but if that seems too Cartesian-theater, no matter. We can perhaps find better language, but I hope the target concept is clear enough: First the cow isn't there (for me), and then it is, not as a pattern of neurons but as a cowish purply image. What has happened? That's the event we're concerned about, which I'm suggesting we could call a "phenomenon".

Any appearance in the mind is the result of some measurement in that the brain measures and interprets wavelengths of light and sound and these measurements are the means by which we interact with the world. — Harry Hindu

The problem here is that, in order to get from "brain measurements of wavelengths of light and sound" to "an appearance in the mind" and the idea that "we" interact with the world, we have to import some new concepts. Mind? We? Where did this subjectivity come from? Once again, the hard problem: How do we get from here to there? Why should there be anything like an appearance in the mind, if the brain seems ideally equipped to do the measuring on its own and respond accordingly?

To say that the alignment between screwdriver and screw is an opaque and brute fact is to have abandoned the search for an overarching explanatory structure. If there is an explanatory structure that preserves both, then that explanation must encompass both the mind that knows reality and reality itself. I don't see how one could arrive at an explanatory structure such as you desire without this overarching aitia. — Leontiskos

Yes, and in fairness, a good evolutionary explanation wants to respect these constraints. It wants to show us how both mind and the world evolved to reflect what you're calling the unum of being and truth. But as Nagel and others have pointed out, if the explanation is genuinely scientific, then it's going to have to account for consciousness (mind) before it can tackle any relation between mind and world. And of course a really thorough explanation would almost certainly dissolve this crude binary, "mind/world". Moreover, the "mind" of evolution may or may not turn out to be the same thing as whatever would be able to, for instance, participate in the Forms. In other words, we may not be able to get from "mind" understood as a singular psychological/biological phenomenon to the sort of mind that could have access to truth. Anyway, we're a long way off from any workable theories about all that.

My take is that the tremendous success of our efforts to understand the world, which has translated into the causal mastery embodied in techne, represents strong evidence that we do come equipped to know the world and that the world is intelligible. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think we have to leave a pretty large area of "the world" open to hermeneutic interpretation rather than empirical/analytic inquiry, but as long as we do that, the world does seem intelligible, as you say. I suppose people will differ here -- for some, that's enough said; for others, me included, there's still the question of why? Maybe "it just is"? But isn't that super-convenient for us? Can some sort of evolutionary account get us to an explanation? Nagel's concerns enter here . . . plus, there remains the question of whether any of this entitles us to speak about necessity and impossibility.

I buy Gadamer's argument that it's quite impossible to make any inferences without begining with some biases. We can always question these biases later. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Me too. I've noticed that some philosophers want to use logical principles as a kind of bulwark against the dreaded hermeneutic circle, which they fear leads to logical nihilism, and relativism in general. Would Gadamer agree that the LNC is a bias? Need a new OP for that.

Yes, that's why the constraint of "whole and unbroken" matters. But that doesn't make Q2 a linguistic problem, since we've stipulated what an "object" will be in this question. We've solved that problem. But what about the problem posed by the question itself, now disambiguated? -- presumably you'd say "No, it can't be divided evenly" and so we want to know whether this is due to a mathematical fact or a fact about the world.

Oh, it left a big impression! He's an elegant, insightful writer. But I think he's wrong on every important point. This is too major a question to tuck into this OP, but I'd love it if you or someone else wanted to do an OP on Rortian pragmatism.

(Have you seen the discussion of Rorty by Richard J. Bernstein, in connection with Gadamer and Habermas, in his Philosophical Profiles? Bernstein's view is, approximately, the same as mine.)

I'm sorry, I wasn't clear. I didn't mean simply omit the terms! I meant rewrite the thesis but avoid using those terms. Give a description you believe is accurate but that doesn't have recourse to "observer" or "experience" .

Could you refer us to which post? And perhaps quote some key passages here, so we can respond? Thanks.

Math, like language, is a tool of logic with rules. If we use it with the idea that our abstraction is trying to match reality, and we are correct in matching our abstractions to reality, it works because that's how we perceive identities, and our identities are not being contradicted by reality — Philosophim

I see what you mean, but we can construct an infinite number of worlds with different abstract entities highlighted (see "grue and bleen", Sider, p. 16) and most of them won't "work" at all, if by "work" you mean "give us a useful conceptual basis for navigating the world." Yet there is nothing wrong, logically, with the way these abstractions are being matched to reality. So can you expand on what it is to "perceive an identity"? -- that seems crucial.

Pancomputationalism . . . would make cause (i.e. how past states determine future states) a sort of stepwise logical entailment. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Does the "pan" part of pancomputationalism provide a response to Jha et al.'s objection? That is, are the background assumptions which Jha et al. call "the very facts that make a purely mathematical result applicable" also generated computationally? I'm out of my depth here, but is there meant to be a beginning to this process of entailment -- some first premises?

Yeah, but remember Kant thought math was synthetic a priori. In other words, our minds are still structuring time and space and experience. The math wasn't "in the world", that would be violating his phenomenal/noumenal distinction — schopenhauer1

OK, I think that's right.

evolution does provide a certain flavor of answer whereby our brains could not but do otherwise. — schopenhauer1

It's appealing as an answer, no doubt. What troubles me about the evolutionary explanation is that the "arrow" seems to go from experience to thought. That is, our minds evolved as they did because of what we encountered in the world. This seems to make the LNC, e.g., contingent on the way the world is. But don't we want something much stricter than that, some way we can talk about necessity and impossibility? Can we arrive at what you're calling "a necessary understanding of the world"?

I'll bring in Nagel any post now! :smile:

acknowledging the various debates of Hume and Kant. — schopenhauer1

Yes, and thanks for the summary. Is it clear to you that either Hume or Kant has the better explanation here? Are Jha et al. Kantians? (Note, too, that Kant did not think math was analytic, like logic. He thought it gave us synthetic knowledge about the intuitive concept of "magnitude" -- that is, number per se. This makes me wonder if he would allow math an explanatory role, as in the above discussion.)

The problem isn't the lack of a complete description. Rather, it's how we can even talk about all this without importing (as you do) the term "observer".
— J

Ok, please explain to me why we can't talk about all this without using the word 'observer'? — jkop

Well, try revising your original description (beginning "Moreover, conscious states . . .") but leave out the terms "observer" and "experience." Let's look at the result and see what we think.

For example, a feeling of being drunk (its existence and why it exists the way it does) is uncontroversially explained by the effects that alcohol has on our cognitive functions. — jkop

Once again, "cognitive functions" is imported into the description as if we knew what it meant, in strictly physical terms. Try revising this description in the same way as suggested above.

Now I don't think we're anywhere near a synthesis of consciousness from unconscious compounds, but if seems fairly clear that consciousness is a biological phenomenon. — jkop

Fairly likely, at least.

Moreover, conscious states such as visual experiences have a hierarchical structure in the sense that the experience is not solely a biological phenomenon. It is also causally constrained by the behavior of light, and influenced by the observer's psychology, sociology, language and culture. All of these can be described, but none of them is a complete description of the experience. However, the lack of a single complete description is hardly a problem. — jkop

The problem isn't the lack of a complete description. Rather, it's how we can even talk about all this without importing (as you do) the term "observer". What possible physicalist justification can there be for this, much less an explanation? "Experience" is another imported word. Sure, we can describe a subjective experience, but how do we explain its existence, or why it exists in the way it does and not in another? That's the hard problem.

In this sense, consciousness is the presence of colors, sounds, smells, and feelings and the thoughts that categorize these sensations into logical ideas the same way a soccer game is the presence of 22 people on a field following rules. — Harry Hindu

Not so sure about "logical ideas" (maybe just "ideas"?) but otherwise I agree.

How do we get from that to consciousness being the interaction of neurons? Is it two separate phenomenon, or the same phenomenon being described from two different perspectives? — Harry Hindu

At this point we need to make sure it's not just a dispute over terms. What do we want "phenomenon" to designate? I vote for something like "appearance to a mind," so that the 22 people and the soccer game are two different phenomena. On that understanding, I want to say that neurons and consciousness are also two different phenomena, appearing from two different perspectives. But notice that it doesn't really matter how we understand "phenomenon" here. We could go the other way and stipulate that "phenomenon" designates a single event in time, in which case the soccer game and consciousness are now redescriptions of "the same phenomenon." Either way, we're left with the hard problem. I know many people want to do some arm-waving here and say, "Well, it's two different descriptions, what more do you need to know?" but surely the answer is, "A lot. Why are these descriptions as they are? What allows the passage from one description to another? Are we right in believing that the mental-level description is grounded in, but not caused by, the physical-level description? Does the physical-level description have a "translation" into Mentalese? When we encounter something as extraordinary as subjective experience, what else do we need to say about it to fill out the experience? Yes, consciousness is, in a sense, "only" a description of how things look to a subject, but don't we feel it's a lot more than that too -- somehow constitutive of identity?" etc. etc.

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

"Sensing" is doing the work of two meanings that shouldn't be confused here.

1) Sensing- akin to "responding in a behavioral kind of way"
2) Sensing- akin to "feeling something".

Clearly we want to know how 1 and 2 are the same, or how 1 leads to 2, etc — schopenhauer1

Right. "The thermostat is sensitive to the temperature" vs. "I feel warm [sensitive to the temperature]". Either is good English, but the philosophical difference is considerable.

I suggest this, though: Hopefully, only a behaviorist believes that 1 and 2 are literally the same. Perhaps what we want to know is, first, How does "feeling something" (sense 2) lead to a physical response (the so-called problem of mental causation)? and, second, Is there a physical substrate in the brain upon which "feeling something" (sense 2) supervenes, such that the feeling is not caused by that substrate? I believe that separating grounding from causation is extremely important here, because otherwise we risk getting pushed into an explanatory situation in which a physical process causes a mysterious and elusive mental effect, despite the best efforts of science to discover it. There's no need for this if we think in terms of supervenience instead.

Yes, and if you "define down" sensing so that it becomes something a thermostat can do, then you're still minus a theory of consciousness, which now has to be defined as something else.

Think logically: if they were stimulus-response machines, who would monitor the sensors? — Wolfgang

I must be missing something. Why do you need a "who" to monitor anything? A thermostat monitors itself just fine. It receives a stimulus and responds accordingly.

you examine a human organism and find that there are sensors — Wolfgang

But to know that they were "sensors," you'd have to already be importing some idea of what it means to sense, i.e., be conscious. Otherwise, aren't the nerves just collections of stimulus-response machines, and isn't that function enough? I don't think this succeeds in avoiding the hard problem.

The hard problem is more about trying to explain how color "arises" from non-colored things, like neurons and wavelengths. — Harry Hindu

I agree. I took that to be part of asking how a "sense" of stimuli could take place.

I don't read "arises" as a type of causation. We need a verb to describe what happens when two phenomena occur at the same time, and yet one appears to ground the other. That's what I think "arises" is supposed to mean here. Causation should be reserved for things that occur sequentially in time. @Wolfgang's two levels of description are a good example. Does the presence of 22 people on a soccer field, following certain rules, "cause" a soccer game? This would be a very awkward and counter-intuitive way of putting it. Rather, we'd say that the soccer game simply is the 22 people following the rules, under a different description.

(Note, BTW, that speaking of "two phenomena" somewhat begs the question, but it's hard to find a non-question-begging way of putting it.)

There's a reason why Chalmers says "arises from" rather than "is caused by." You're assuming causation here, but that's not built into the hard problem. Have you read Jaegwon Kim? His ideas on supervenience and other grounding relations are very helpful.

This question is similar to asking why H2O is wet — Wolfgang

Can you explain why this is a tautological question? I would have said that there are non-tautological, chemical reasons that explain why H2O, at a certain temperature, is wet.

Centralization in the brain brought with it the need for a feedback mechanism that made it possible to consciously perceive incoming stimuli – consciousness, understood as the ability to sense stimuli. — Wolfgang

But that's precisely the hard problem: Whence this "ability to sense stimuli"? Why couldn't the stimuli simply do their thing (including whatever self-correction you want to build into it) without being sensed? And don't forget that the other aspect of the hard problem is to explain its modal status: Is consciousness necessarily as it is? What is it about biological life that gives rise to this phenomenon, this "feedback mechanism," rather than some other?

And of course this all leaves out the scientific question: Exactly how did the evolutionary process occur? What happens with neurons that leads to consciousness? Fortunately, this aspect of the hard problem is not for us philosophers to solve!

Many thanks. I'll try the Heidegger lectures; always looking for entry points to MH's thought, which I find uncongenial.

But this just pushes back the theory of error one step. So these philosophers are offering fairly pained interpolations, trying to rescue nonsense? But why? Why would they be doing this?

The comparison with Mein Kampf doesn’t really work, because we do have a good theory to explain why many people were fooled by that book. What explains a Habermas scholar being fooled by Habermas? Dumb? Perverse? Doesn’t really seem to fit. What, then?

Fair enough, and of course the response of someone like you, who's clearly done his reading, makes me think I've still missed something with Derrida. This is a tall order, but if you had to name a single work by Derrida that shows him at his best, what would it be? If I haven't read it, I'll try to.

There's an ironic tradeoff there where in order to make physicalism meaningful, you pretty much have to make it wrong or at least so problematic as to be questionably worth defending. — Baden

Good point. My response to @T Clark, above, is an attempt to mount such a defense, in the spirit of charity. But you're right, it's open to a lot of questions.

it seems to me that "You just don't get it yet" is the underlying notion here — AmadeusD

Well, not quite. The response I and others are making is more like, "Keep trying." And the "keep trying" can take many forms, including asking another philosopher who admires Habermas (to pick one of your examples) to point out to you some critical sections, and/or a good commentary. Then there's this: If the Continentals are "totally unclear as to what's actually being posited or 'argued for'," then you need a very robust "theory of error" to explain how it's the case that thousands of skilled philosophers think otherwise, and spend a great deal of time discussing the ideas of Habermas et al. Yes, it's possible they're all just unintelligent, but that's not what I'd call a robust theory!

. . . And then there's Derrida. Like Janus, I've done my due diligence with him and have concluded that he's an extremely good rhetorician who discovered a "cool gig" and stuck with it. So, an exception to every rule . . . :smile:

This all makes sense. The separation of realism from conventionalism and nominalism is important, I agree. (Sider speaks about it terms of a “privileged structure” of the world.) The angle I referred to, from which perplexities can arise, involves bringing in truth as a parameter. How do we move from “evolutionarily helpful/necessary” through “pattern recognition” to truth?

A simple example would be the pattern of day and night. It was certainly important for the human species’ survival to be able to recognize this repeating pattern, and to be able to make predictions about when and how darkness would fall, for how long, etc. But when language enters the picture, we get a series of explanations that all involve the sun doing things like rising and falling. While this is accurate pattern recognition, it happens to be untrue. So . . . what is it that allows language to move beyond mere phenomena, and strive for a truth that is observer-independent?

I don’t think this is some kind of knockdown argument against evolutionary explanations, but is meant to indicate how they need expansion.

I would guess that most people who agree with the physicalist approach also agree that a reductionist approach is also correct. I think the argument could be made that they are the same thing. — T Clark

And that would be stringent or hardcore physicalism. But I'm trying to be fair to physicalism as a more general thesis (one I don't agree with, but it deserves a hearing). I have a number of friends who would, if pressed, probably deny that there's anything out there except the physical world. But nor would they claim that you can use the fundamental entities of physics to explain macro-phenomena like economic behavior. Are they simply refusing to accept the consequences of their physicalism? Not necessarily. We can construct a sort of "best we can do right now" position that would go: "Sure, we have loads of unanswered questions about how physical realities interact, and how they can be causally effective. But at the end of the (scientific) day, I'm betting that the answers will still fail to reveal anything beyond the physical. We have to wait and see, but my money is on physicalism."

I think that sort of physicalism is much harder to argue against.

This is a really useful context for exploring physicalism, thanks for posting. One question to start with: We all have an idea what physicalism is, but as you point out, there are many varieties, some more stringent than others. Your three criticisms of the central tenets suggest a good-enough definition of how you’re using “physicalism,” but I’d like to get clearer on exactly how you think of it.

In particular, it’s a crucial point whether physicalism has to declare by fiat that anything that exists or happens has a lawlike physical basis, thus in effect relabeling what most of us would call “non-physical” in ordinary circumstances. @Leontiskos mentioned Nagel’s The Last Word, and as usual Nagel puts it well: “I [want to] interpret the concept of ‛physics’ restrictively enough so that the laws of physics by themselves will not explain the presence of . . . thinking beings in the space of natural possibilities. Of course, if ‛physics’ just means the most fundamental scientific theory about everything, then it will include any such laws if they exist.” If that’s all physicalism amounts to, then you’re right, it adds nothing conceptually.

As we move up the hierarchies of scale, then maybe it makes sense to talk about non-physicalist answers, e.g. what is the nature of the mind. — T Clark

Here’s a fourth, related criticism I would add to your three: Understandably, when we think of physicalism, we think of something connected with the physical sciences, where it has indeed largely “worked so far.” But physicalism is not physics, and the real challenge for physicalism is to explain the lawlike behaviors, if there are such, of the entities studied in psychology, sociology, history, literature – in short, the human sciences. To say that physicalism has worked here would be news to a historian. And if you responded by telling her that her discipline did not produce objective facts and theories, was in short not scientific, she would laugh at you, I hope. My point is that there is a gargantuan explanatory gap between the sorts of things that chemistry can explain and the sorts of things that political science or economics can explain. We can wave our hands and say that “someday” we’ll have a quark-level explanation of the law of supply and demand, but 1) no one believes this, really; 2) it wouldn’t explain what needs explaining; and 3) again, this is something that has definitely not worked so far.

So in order to defend physicalism, I think a philosopher has to argue for why physicalism is not reductive in the sense just described. And this runs the risk of starting the relabeling process, with entities like “nations” construed as somehow “just physical” because we can devise theories that are lawlike to explain their behavior.

Actually, I agree with that too. If there's any perplexity here, it has to do with the role language plays in constructing our experience of the world. Is it clear that the screw precedes the screwdriver? Most of the time, I'd say yes, but the interesting philosophical questions crop up when language creation seems to bleed over into concept creation, which in turn may influence our take on what "the world" is. But you guys know all this, it's Phil 101. I'll spend some time on your longer post, Schop.

I'm not sure whether the Tractatus is quite as common-sense as you're describing it, but I'm no authority on matters Wittian. I agree that the propositions you stated as being Tractarian fit common-sense ideas about how language relates to the world.

Information theory seems to have some role to play for why "The grass is green" makes sense, AND then what it means to say, "It is true that grass is green". These are two different capabilities, possibly being conflated in this discussion, revolving around Frege. — schopenhauer1

Yes, two different capabilities. As we've seen, Kimhi wants to minimize or even eliminate what is different about them, in aid of unifying thinking and being. Glad to learn more about how information theory might apply, if you have some references.

One possible insight: The question about how language/logic corresponds to the world is rather unclear. Some philosophers seem to take "correspond" to mean "reveal formal commonalities" or even "make a picture of." Others are content with showing any kind of naming or symbolic relationship, and for them this is correspondence enough. What question are we examining here? I suggest it's about the latter kind of correspondence, since even if there is no formal or pictorial relationship between "The cat is on the mat" and 1) the idea of a cat on a mat, and/or 2) the fact of an actual cat on a mat, it's still puzzling, from a certain angle, why we can rely on language to make reliable connections of this sort.

I'll lead you to something, but first let me take the route there..

Why do you think the Tractarian vision of "states of affairs" and "true propositions" pointing to the states of affairs as anything really profound rather than common sense? That is to say, this notion that the world exists, we talk about it with statements that pick out possibly true ones. — schopenhauer1

Happy to go with you, but could you restate the question? Something off about the grammar.

:lol:

The very idea that in language we represent the world, is probably a sort of illusion, or a myth. — Srap Tasmaner

This may be getting to the heart of it, especially if we push back, even gently, on the idea that "language" and "world" are easily separable and distinct. Language, or at least some parts of it, may in fact construct the world rather than represent it.

I'm happy to drop either "fact" or "state of affairs," as long as it's clear that, whichever one we retain, it's the non-linguistic referent of a statement.

Yikes! But I don't think so. We need to make statements in order to talk about anything, certainly, but that doesn't mean that everything we talk about is also made of statements.

The statement describes or names a particular situation in the world. This is done using words. What I'm calling a "particular situation in the world" (aka "state of affairs") is non-linguistic. It involves things like cats and mats. That's the difference. But again, this is (to me) so uncontroversial that I'm sure I'm not yet understanding you. What is wrong with this picture? Or, to ask it a different way, what term would you rather use for stuff out in the world to which statements refer? We may just be disputing terminology.

Have you ever noticed that when someone sets out a state of affairs, they do it by setting out a statement? — Banno

Agreed, but just about no one mistakes the statement for the state of affairs. But you know this, so I realize there's something I'm not understanding here. Expand?