"Red" is a label that humans give to that radiation when they see it.

Perhaps you need to rephrase this, as we do not see radiation, we see coloured snooker balls and the like. "Red" is a label we give to a visible features of the things we see. We were labelling things "red" long before we even had a theory that predicted electromagnetic radiation.

@SteveKlinko

We know that the Redness of the snooker ball will ultimately produce particular Neural Activity in the Brain. The Neural Activity is what leads to the Conscious Red experience. We know this because, if these particular Neurons are stimulated in the right way by probing, then the same Conscious Red experience can be attained. Maybe not of a snooker ball but the experience will be of Redness.

First, the research on visual cortical stimulation that I am aware of doesn't warrant such a claim to knowledge. For ethical reasons, the evidence base is exceedingly small, for one thing. Also, the reports of the actual subjects at most show that stimulation of the visual cortex is statistically correlated with reports of phosphenes, but even some of those reports involve the curious idea that these phosphenes - whatever they are - are colourless. If you have more recent and definitive research to back up your claim, I'd be interested if you could provide a link to it.
Secondly, you mention yourself the redness of the snooker ball as the start of a supposedly causal story in vision - the end of that causal story is that I see the redness of the snooker ball. Nothing so far said requires the existence of any other instance of redness to enter the picture. The supposed neural activity you are talking about could simply be part of what goes on in opening us up to an actual feature of the environment.

I think @Wayfarer probably hit the nail on the head, but also - although I do not think MN needs any help from me - simply to respond "No" to your question doesn't commit MN to any particular position one way or another. Your original question was "So you don't think that humans are finitely realizable physical systems?" responding "No" to that question does not entail that MN thinks that humans are not finitely realizable physical systems - it's a subtlty concerned with the scope of negation which may have escaped you. He may believe, for instance, that the notion of a finitely realizable physical system, or indeed even the notion of a human being, is not clear enough to be able to reach any reasonable conclusion concerning whether one is an instance of the other or not, and in which case the reasonable position is probably to suspend judgement.

Yep, tom missed the point - but I cannot say I'm surprised. To be explicit, the issue is this: if I cannot distinguish between my seeing the redness of the snooker ball and my consciously seeing the redness of the snooker ball, what is there to my consciously seeing the redness of the snooker ball over and above my seeing the redness of the snooker ball?

1) I see the redness of the snooker ball.
2) I consciously see the redness of the snooker ball.
In what kind of circumstances could the truth of these two statements come apart?
If they are always true or false in the same circumstances, then what is added by talk of consciously seeing anything.
In both cases, it looks like what is being seen is an instances of a visible property and that instance, wherever it is, is no more inside my skull than the snooker ball itself is.

I see MetaphyicsNow got there before me, but your question seems a little unfair since I don't believe you have really said anything substantive about what you take intelligence to be. MN's general point - if I understand correctly - is that it is a complex concept that does not have any one-one relation to some property of human beings. Nothing you have said so far undermines that idea.

Or perhaps better
What is possible depends on what is actual.
What is actual changes.
Anything that depends on something that changes, itself changes.
Therefore what is possible changes.

Change "change" for "evolve" if you prefer.

So is the argument something along the lines of
Possibility depends on actuality..
What is actual changes.
Anything that depends on something that changes, itself changes.
Therefore possibility changes?

Are you claiming that what is happening in a catalytic reaction does not obey quantum mechanics?

No, I'm suggesting that the phenomena modelled by the equations of a law such as the Bronsted Law of Catalysis have no currently settled quantum model. That's the way things were a few years ago anyway, perhaps there's been a break through that I'm not aware of. I know that the advances in the availability of computing power have been pushing things along, but there was still a way to go last time I looked. But don't get hung up on the chemistry angle, the same point MN is making could be made for other special sciences: there is no quantum mechanical model for natural selection of species for instance, but it's at least tempting to think that natural selection is a theory which concerns physical things and events.

We need to employ the laws of physics to calculate the energy.

Well, calculating the energy of a system is part and parcel of doing physics, for sure, but I don't see why that vitiates Uber's point that we can demarcate the physical from the non-physical in terms of constraints such as the conservation of energy. I think the point is that we are trying to find some stable principle to allow a dermacation of the phyiscal from the non-physical. Sure, the conservation of energy isa guiding principle of physics, but its a guiding principle of chemistry and biology as well - it is a fixed point across all sciences.

the Scientific Method.

The definite article? You seriously believe that what scientific method is is not a philosophical issue? You learnt your philosophy in a physics lab perhaps?

@tom@MetaphysicsNow Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets for round 4 of tom v MetaphysicsNow. MN has a clear 3-0 lead (two knock outs in the so-called Free Will Theorem debates, and a points victory awarded by referee Uber in the implications of time-invariance) but I might take a risk on the underdog for this one.

Firstly, on the "reduction" of chemical laws to physical laws, there has been a lot of research into looking into the quantum mechanical basis of catalytic behaviour. That's certainly true, and MN should take a look at it. However, although I admit not being right up to date with the latest research, my understanding is that there had been no straightforward mapping of a law such as the Bronsted Law of Catalysis to the Schrodinger Wave Equation. So in that sense of reduction (one-one mapping of laws from one domain to laws in another) there remain laws of chemistry which have not been reduced to laws of physics. That being so, there is certainly a sense of "laws of physics" whereby the chemical reactions of the type which are the subject of the Bronsted Law are not the subject of laws of physics, which would - under the proposed definition of physical - mean that those reactions are not physical. Of course,tom might have another conception of a law of physics, but if so he would need to make that clear (and obviously do so with just saying that they are laws that treat of physical things, because then we really are in a very unillumintaing circle if our search is for some criterion of what is to count as physical).

Secondly, although I have not come across the "Criterion of Demarcation" before, just looking it up very quickly shows that it is a disputable and disputed philosophical criterion for making a dividing line between the scientific and the non-scientific. I don't think any philosophical dispute is going to be settled by appealing to a disputed philosophical criterion.

Thirdly, this notion of measuring energy. We don't directly measure energy, it is calculated. For instance, you measure the mass of an object and its velocity - given a frame of reference of course - and you can calculate its kinetic energy relative to that frame. But in one sense of "measure" that would be enough to measure the kinetic energy of the object. After all, we talk about measuring the calorific energy content of a peanut, but to do so we set the peanut alight and measure the temperature by which that lighted peanut raises a known amount of water. But if by "measurement" tom means "direct measurement" then perhaps we never measure energy. On the other hand, if we push the notion of directness, perhaps we never directly measure any physical quantity.

Not sure there are any viable theories of an emergent space.

Yep, but if or when there are, they will be physical and treat of physical events which are not spatiotemporal, so @Uber is right that his idea of the physical in terms of energy constraints is more inclusive than mine in terms of spatiotemporal locations. Of course, if one day physics drops the notion of energy, seeing even energy as an emergent feature of something else then things become more complicated. Of course, I'm probably making a mistake there in even treating energy as a kind of stuff, I've heard some physicists compare it to an accounting device that just has to turn out to be balanced when calculations are made.

Ah, I kind of agree with that. I think functionalists would tend, however, to say that ultimately there simply is no hard problem in the sense that we're talking about. A thoroughgoing functionalist will presumably hold to the idea that to give a full account of what a mental state is just is to give its entire functional role (of course, that would be a theoretical ideal, in scientific practice we could get by with something less than the ideal in order to identify which mental states we were investigating) - there's nothing left over after we do that, that needs explaining (including qualia or whatever your prefered term happens to be). We then, as neuroscientists, move on to how those functional roles are actually manifested in human biology (since our interests are pragmatic) and we see what useful stuff we can come up with with curing blindness/epilepsy etc etc.
That might be a less grandiose project than Seth and co claim they are engaged in, but as far as I can tell that is the most that they can be engaged in or as scientists would want to be engaged in.

The way we gain knowledge about emergence, in our context, is by learning how small groups of neurons form certain networks. And then we learn how these small networks form progressively larger networks. And the process continues until we can reliably detect and demonstrate how the global properties of conscious experience emergence from these mesoscopic (and higher) degrees of freedom.

Sorry, but that sounds like a long winded way of saying that we gain knowledge about emergence by assuming there is emergence.
At some point the explanation has to move from "look, all these patterns (everso complicated to produce) are correlated with conscious experience" to "look, all these patterns produce conscious experience" (or if you prefer, "look,consciousness emerges from all these patterns"). It's the move from the one to the other that that seems to require that the hard problem already be solved.

A slight later edit: I understand that you think we are a long way from solving the hard problem (to be honest, I think even the idea that there is a hard problem already requires accepting a lot of questionable metaphysics, but that's a different topic). My point is just that what that Seth and co are actually doing is showing us that such and such neural patterns are regularly correlated (although far from perfectly - the important results he talks about in the video you linked to are statistical it seems to me) with such and such consicous experiences. Correlation is not causation, but it seems to me at least that the idea of emergence has a causal dimension.

Isn't the point that the idea that we are gaining any knowledge about emergence is what is in question? What Seth and the like are at most doing (under one understanding anyway, not saying it is mine) is showing in greater and greater detail that certain patterns of neural activity (in certain kinds of context, if you want to go externalist) are correlated with certain types of conscious experience. They are not (according to the same understanding) showing that those types of conscious experience could not occur in the absence of those patterns. Establishing emergence would need to involve some kind of corroboration that ruled out that kind of possibility, some kind of corroboration that there really could not be conscious experience in the absence of those patterns. So, in some sense, the idea seems to be that to establish emergence to any extent, they would already have to have solved the hard problem.

any particular physical state is necessarily associated with any particular mental state

You don't need necessary connections. The basic idea behind most of cognitive neuroscience these days is the functionalist one that what a mental state is can be defined in terms of what typically causes it and what it typically causes. We then make the assumption that that particular, abstractly defined causal role is, as a matter of contingent fact, performed by the brain (or the brain + other parts of the body and even, if you want to go externalist, + parts of the environment). What I see Anil Seth and his ilk as doing is working in the context of that kind of view of the mind - they are just using technological advances to push the investigation further on from the general handwaving you used to get in functionalist theories of mind.

Thus I've done what few people in this forum seemed to have any interest in doing: provide a general definition of physical stuff that at the same time demarcates naturalism from supernaturalism. Clearly God should not be energetically constrained! And the soul can apparently survive for eternity after death. So, very much a reasonable dividing line between the two realms.

This is interesting. Have you read Hart's The Engines of the Soul? He supports Cartesian dualism and does so along with the incorporation of the idea that the relation between mind and body is to be modelled in terms of energy transference and (by implication) constraint. So, if Hart is right (and of course I'm not saying he is) energy conservation won't demarcate the material from the mental. I suppose it might still allow for some sense of demarcating the physical, but from what? The abstract maybe, but we can do that with just the idea that the physical is whatever has spatiotemporal location can't we?

It will definitely help you identify valid and invalid arguments - it probably won't help you much in identifying the sound ones amongst the former though. For that, as Samuel Lacrampe indicates, you'll need more than just the tools of deduction.

So tom, seems you are wrong about this:

Nope, you only need initial conditions, which can be given at any time. Differential equations are by their very nature time-symmetric, deterministic.

And for at least two connected reasons:
1) There are differential equations used in physics which are not invariant under time reversal, and so symmetry gets broken
2) Because of this there is no way to tell just given intitial conditions what exact symmetry breaking occured in order for the initial conditions to obtain.
I expect MetaphysicsNow will be along to gloat at some point.

If nihilism is supposed to be the idea that there can be no such things as values, then Nietzche was very definitely not an explicit nihilist. But as far as I am aware he did embrace nihilism towards the values contemporary for his time, their bases having been undermined by the intellectual advance of mankind, nothing was left to support them. He believed, I think, that it was possible to come out the other side of that nihilism in one piece, but I'm not sure what he thought that side of the tunnel would look like. I've heard some people say that he thought mankind's principle motiviation should be the creation of great works of art, but that seems to be a little simplistic.

Thanks for the confirmation.

I think we should take this onto a different thread as it is getting way off the point. As I follow things the debate starts off being about the role of causation in physics and really kicks off with the following claim from tom

Deterministic physical theories, being time-invariant, render causality meaningless.

MetaphysicsNow asked tom to explain what conception he had of determinism that was free of the notion of causality (most usual notions of determinism being very closely tied to causality). Tom still hasn't answered that question. Then the dispute becomes about time-reversal and differential equations and it loses me a little, but what does seem clear is that tom believes that given merely the initial description of a physical system, the laws of physics allow you to calculate backwards as well as forwards in time, i.e allow you to calculate how the system actually arrived in that state in the first place. As far as I can see, that is just false, and MetaphysicsNow gave a pretty convincing reason why - there are indefinitely many physical possibilities regarding how that physical state came to be, and since they are physical possibilities, the laws of physics and the initial conditions will not provide you with the means to select just one of those possibilities. I think perhaps this links to your idea that the course of the universe has always involved symmetry breaking and not boring equilibrium, and given merely the initial conditions, we cannot say exactly how the symettry was broken to arrive at them.
Anyway, that's my take on it.

Point taken, and thanks for clarifying. Personally I don't think anything is riding on whether invariance under time reversal is true for all laws, the claim is that even where it is the case,you don't get time-reversal symmetry without it being a symmetry between two distinct and well defined states of a system.
However, now you've raised the point (although it's a little off topic) is there not a way to model the friction/dissipation (in Hamiltonian mechanics perhaps) such that invariance under reversal of sign of the time parameters is preserved? It's a genuine question - I don't know the answer, but I assume there is one, and perhaps you do.

As @Wayfarer indicates, my understanding was that Berkeley has God doing all the hard work of keeping things moving along smoothly, Mill and the logical positivists after him were less inclined to theological solutions to the problem. I think the LPs, rather than supposing permanent possibilities were grounded in actualities, preferred to take a linguistic turn and assume that the regularities were to be accounted for by the truths of counterfactual conditionals (someone will correct me if I'm wrong about that). Of course, that leaves open the question of what makes the counterfactual conditionals true - so we are back to a grounding issue.
Subjective idealism indeed might need to be augmented with some kind of realism about abstract entities, so that the regularities in concrete experience map relations between those abstracta. However, if you let realism in for abstracta, what becomes the motivation for not being realist about particulars as well? I've not looked into that question myself, but I do wonder whether it is an accident that Berkeley rejected Locke's notion of abstract general ideas.

What cluelessness is MetaphysicsNow manifesting? I was under the impression that time-reversal symmetry in physics was precisely the idea that given intial conditions and terminating conditions, you can get from the latter to the fomer by reversing the time-dependent parameters. I've heard it colloquially explained in terms of there being no physical difference between a film of two billiard balls colliding whether run backwards or forwards. That seems to be what MN is getting at. What's the correct view?

Objects would only exist as thoughts.

This betrays a very deep misunderstanding of what idealism is (in all its varieties).
Even Berkeley's pretty brute idealism insists on a distinction between thoughts and the objects of thoughts. Kantian transcendental idealism is even more insistent on the division.

Everything else would be non-physical and therefore pointless to ponder.

You have strongly held opinions. Where does mathematics and its objects figure in your view of things? Physical and causal? Non-causal, non-physical and pointless to ponder?

One kind of materialism is mind-brain materialism, I think that is consistent with the belief that there are non-physical (i.e. abstract) things (numbers/properties etc). At least, it doesn't seem obvious to me that materialism is committed to nominalism.

Medieaval philosophy isn't as popular as it was a thousand years ago. Maybe you should try contacting by email a philosophy faculty member with an expertise in medieval philosophy. Here for instance?

I'll leave you now to go ahead and play Lewis Carroll's Humpty Dumpty all by yourself, and I suggest @jkg20 do the same. .

:lol: :up:

In reality, to follow a rule is to hold a principle within one's own mind, and adhere to it.

This seems to miss the point of Wittgenstein's challenge regarding rule following (at least under Kripke's interpretation of it) - it merely pushes the sceptical challenge back to asking what tells you which principle it is that you hold in your own mind.

So your metaphysics includes both non-if-then-facts and if-then-facts. For the former, their truth consists in some kind of relationship to the way things are (and I leave open that the way things are might in part be determined by our ways of coming to find out about them, and thus allow for both materialistic, idealistic and pragmatist metaphysics). For the latter, their truth consists in the logical relations between propositions used to express the non-if-then-facts. So even here we seem to have introduced another non-if-then-fact: there are logical relations between propositions. Since your metaphysics depends on the existence of these relationships, how do you account for their existence? Is it just a brute non-if-then-fact?

That there’s no experimental evidence that your experience is other than that.

I do not need experimental evidence to know that I have experience. Indeed, the very idea of experimental evidence presupposes the idea that someone has already had experience of some kind. So there is at least one substantive non-if-then fact (to use your curious terminology): that there is experience.
What is my experience experience of?
Well some of my experiences are of instances of colour and shape, they tend to get called visual experiences. Again, I don't need experimental evidence to know this - again, insofar as experimental evidence is visual evidence, the existence of such things is presupposed.
So, there's another non-if-then fact: There are experiences of colour and shape.
And now as metaphysicians we can start asking questions about what these experiences of colour and shape are. Can we take an act-object view of them, for instance? If we can, then not only are there experiences of colour and shape, but there are also instances of colour and shape - and so yet another non-if-then-fact emerges for us to investigate.
Looks like we can do metaphysics without if-then facts. Of course, Descartes got there before me - maybe you've heard of him. If you haven't, I suggest you try reading his Meditations, it pretty much kick-starts modern philosophy.

I think the point is that Shakespeare may have been inspired in this scene by some kind of philosophical dispute current at the time concerning perception and language, and the search is for written sources to back this up. I think that idea is a stretch - as does @MetaphysicsNow as far as I can tell. We could be wrong - what we need is someone steeped in Scholastic and Renaissance thought, which I certainly am not.

OK, well in that case, what would be interesting would be to see if that greatest of Elizabethan philosophers, Francis Bacon, had anything to say on the issue. I'm not really aquainted with his stuff, but if you want to find out what the cutting edge of philosophical thought was at the time, Bacon is probably the place to start. Perhaps he discusses colour vision and language?
Isn't there some crazy theory that Bacon actually wrote at least some of Shakespeare's works, incidently?

Whitehead was right that it is probably more important in philosophy to be interesting than it is to be true, but even Whitehead gave truth a significant role in philosophy. :

The importance of truth is that it adds to interest. — Whitehead

Of course, he also said things along the lines that there were no whole truths, only half-truths, so he seems to have held some kind of idea that there is a continuum between falsehood and truth. Nevertheless, just brushing truth aside seems a little cavalier, but then Bryant in that blog post seems stuck on the correspondence theory of truth as if it were the only game in town, which of course it is very definitely not. For one thing, this metaphor of a frame he uses, when you cash it out and ask a philosopher what frame they are working with, the answer is presumably a set of propositions. Some of them might be very banal, some of them might be empty metaphorical handwaving, some of them might be substantively interesting, and of the latter, it doesn't seem cretin-headed in the least to investigate whether they may be true or not. Of course, the interest in such cases may well lie in the procedure of establishing whether they are true or not rather than the mere fact that they are true or false, but it is still the hunt for truth that moves things along.

Seems to me that we just have Shakespeare having the smart-arse Gloucester using a fairly humdrum fact (that you have to be taught the meaning of colour words just like any other words) in order to undo a pretty shallow scam aimed at fooling a weak and credulous king. Even back in Shakespeare's day educated people would have been well aware that language is learnt. Why did Shakespeare choose vision in this case? Well the miracle recounted in the Gospels of Jesus bestowing sight on a beggar is probably the source I'd say. Of course, you can take that scene in Shakespeare and spin out of it an interesting discussion about the distinction and connections between naming and sensing colours, and you could probably trace the issues all the way back to the ancient Greeks, but as exegesis of Shakespeare, it doesn't strike me as convincing. Not saying that Shakespeare had no interest in the metaphysics and epistemology of perception - consider Macbeth's dagger for instance, just not in that scene.

Relations also relate hypothetical, nonexistent things to eachother. Are Slitheytoves and Jaberwockeys existent things?

Of course not, and there are no relations that relate Slitheytoves to Jaberwockeys either. There are logical relations that relatestatements about Slitheytoves to statements about Jaberwockeys. However, there are distinct kinds of relata and relations which concern existent things and which your metaphyics remains utterly mute on because your metaphysics deals only with the logical relation between statements not the physical relations between existent things. That is a pretty significant gap in a metaphysical system. Please do not try to obfuscate the issue by equating "physical" with "material", everything I say here is consistent with an idealistic metaphysics.

But, as I said, it's time to agree to disagree, and to discontinue this conversation.

This specific issue is not about agreement or disagreement, this is about you being wrong about what one can prove in mathematics given a set of axioms. Just admit that you have a scanty knowledge of number theory, drop those kind of examples from your posts, and address the lacunae in your metaphysics.

As I said, there's no evidence that our physical world is other than that.

Other than what? Other than a system of relations? Relations relate things to other things, so the physical world - whatever else it is - certainly includes those things that stand in relations to each other, Metaphysics needs to address the nature of the things that stand in relations to each other as well as to the nature of the relations in which they do so stand.

But I'll add that the common arithmetical axiom-system that I refer to doesn't include a definition of multiiplication or addition, but merely mentions them as two operations, with respect to which the axioms for the number systems are stated.

Precisely. So, in order to get 2+2=4 out of this system of axioms for the real numbers, you need already a recursive definition of addition, otherwise you are stuck with 0 and 1 and the reals between them. Sure, you can add definitions (1+1)=2 , (2+1) =3, (3+1)=4... but either that is eliptical for defining addition recursively (as per Peano arithmetic for the natural numbers) or you need to supplement the axioms you link to with axioms for the existence of 2, 3 and 4. The system of arithmetic for the real number system trades off of the system of arithmetic for the natural number system and usually in order to prove that 2+2=4 you will need all the axioms of natural number arithmetic. In all cases you will need more than just the truth of the axiom of associativity for addition, so your conditional:

IF the additive associative axiom is true, THEN 2 + 2 = 4

is false, since (without all the required additional definitions and axioms) the antecedent could be true and the consequent false.

As I said, the arithmetical axiom system for the counting-numbers, with respect the the addition and multiplication operations, that typically and usually used, stated and cited is the one in which associativity is an axiom, not a theorem.

Please provide a link to a site where this "usually used stated and cited" axiomatic system is set out clearly, preferably by a mathematician.