Here's the problem, because that looks like simple causation to me. In the old potentiometers, there was an electromagnet working against a spring, so that he great the voltage the greater the stretch. Isn't the idea with emergence that we get more than we put in? Pressure from a container full of gas particles, a flood from a series of rain drops, existential angst from neural networks and so on.

quote="frank;870141"]Best explanation I've ever heard. Thank you, my friend. :up:[/quote]
You're welcome. It's just me sorting stuff out.

Anyone else you'd append for someone to explore? — AmadeusD

Chapter five here is worth a read. Thanks, @Ludwig V.

In other words, then, there are no good arguments for physicalism, insofar as it is presumed to be a monistic explanation — Wayfarer

On the contrary, physicalism is exactly true, if what you are doing is physics. That's the methodological point made way back in the second post here. Physics has no place for explanations that are not physical, but in turn it has to restrict itself to not presenting explanations of things from outside its purview.

Trying to slip spirituality or Zen into physics is like trying to win Chess by presenting a full house.

...it actually reduced my confidence in "emergence," — Count Timothy von Icarus

As with causality, it doesn't seem to stand up to close inspection.

There are two opposing errors going on in these responses.

The first is the rejection of physicalism in its entirety, the attempted denial of all things physical.

The second is that not only do we live in a physical world but that physical explanations are to be preferred to any other sort of explanation.

Each respondent defends one or the other, few taking as extreme a stance on either, preferring a little nuance. Each seeks to provide a single overall account of how the world works.

But that's not how the world works.

Folk should be familiar with this image:

And the accompanying text:

Here the sentence is a complex of names, to which a complex of elements corresponds. The primary elements are the coloured squares. “But are these simple?” I wouldn’t know what I could more naturally call a ‘simple’ in this language-game. But under other circumstances, I’d call a monochrome square, consisting perhaps of two rectangles or of the elements colour and shape, “composite”. But the concept of compositeness might also be extended so that a smaller area was said to be ‘composed’ of a greater area and another one subtracted from it. Compare the ‘composition’ of forces, the ‘division’ of a line by a point outside it; these expressions show that we are sometimes even inclined to conceive the smaller as the result of a composition of greater parts, and the greater as the result of a division of the smaller.
But I do not know whether to say that the figure described by our sentence consists of four or of nine elements! Well, does the sentence consist of four letters or of nine? And which are its elements, the types of letter, or the letters? Does it matter which we say, so long as we avoid misunderstandings in any particular case? — LW, Philosophical Investigations, §48

What you have in your thread is somewhat like two teams looking at this diagram, the one insisting that the Numbers explain what it is about; while the other insist it is the Colours that allow us to understand. Their error is to think that there must be one explanation. Their argument is as a result interminable, and doubtless will go on long after I post this. (See PI§402)

There's more, of course, since this initial error leads one to compound one's mistakes. The idealists, when held to account, find that they are unable to give a simple account of error, or even of their not being alone. The physicalist uses words like "reduction" or "emergence", waving a hand in the air when asked what such things might actually be.

The alternative to both is found most explicitly in that grandmother of philosophy, Mary Midgley, but can be seen in other Oxbridge philosophers from the middle of last century. It's simply that we use different types of explanation in different situations, that we need not, indeed ought not, commit to there being a single monolithic explanation of everything.

The world is far too interesting for that.

, , yes, 's is an excellent post.

But can anyone set out clearly what emergence is?

It could be both a way of thinking and a thing in the world. — Moliere

Indeed. Not unlike the way we use proper names.

..a relation rather than a thing... — Moliere

Well, yes, cause is a relation, and causation a philosopher's pet.

What does the way we are bound to think have to do with the way the world is? — frank

:grin:

Are causes in the world or in the way we describe the world?

, If it is a way of thinking, is causation then not a thing in the world so much as a way of understanding things in the world?

Just the notion of an action being understood under a certain description. That idea is at least nascent in Ryle. The difference between squeezing clay between one's fingers and forming a sculpture. The same strategy I think applies to causation.

In other words, you seem to be conflating descriptions of phenomena with phenomena. — Janus

The congenital problem with idealism.

Ouch.

Excellent post.

I'm interested in your take on emergence. From the SEP:

What about emergence? The term is used in a variety of ways, in the sciences as well as philosophy. These uses are so wildly divergent that it is not clear that there is a common core notion. — Supervenience

Can you offer any clarification?

Compare Anscombe's discussion of cause...

Is he moving his arm up and down? Pumping water? Doing his job? Clicking out a steady rhythm? Making a funny shadow on the rock behind him? Well, it could be that all of these descriptions are true. — SEP Anscombe

Then explain it to me.

It's a perfectly valid English expression, obfuscated by Betrand Russell in support of his own philosophical agenda. — Wayfarer

Meh. You have no argument.

Just to be clear, my target is the sort of thinking found in 's Op, and in simplistic suppositions in this thread that mind is caused by brains. the way causation is treated in science is way more sophisticated than such accounts imply, and even more so in our accounts of our everyday actions. The notion of non-reductive supervenience only gives a rough outline of what might be going on. The outcome is hopefully an account of mind in a physical world that does not rely on the nonsense of idealism.

So yes, it is in your face, Wayf. As in, it runs against what you have been proposing hereabouts.

I'm not convinced the latter exist in the way they're purported to. — fdrake

And I'm not sure how they are purported to exist. Another thread, sometime.

What about 'energy' or 'force'? — Janus

Sure, I gave you the links, go ahead and type them in and see what you get.

The result is much the same: "cause" occurs about two orders of magnitude less often than other key terms in physics.

Two orders of magnitude. If "cause" is a key concept in physics, it's one that's scarcely mentioned.

It's not the people doing physics making use of "A causes B" in their work, but the folk who talk about what physicist do: the methodologists and philosophers. And it's a gross oversimplification. As can be seen in your short list of examples.

We can just leave the reduction issue for later, I think — fdrake

Well, it seems not, since you go on to talk of bridge laws and supervenience.

Anomalous monism amounts to denying that there are bridge laws between brains and intentional attitudes.

My inclination is to agree with this. But I'm not sure if you agree, or not.

There's a grave danger of angry dolphins here. It might be clearer if I take issue with this:

The argument style I find most persuasive for physicalism is causal closure. If you find that A causes B, it's hard to explain how phenomena of type A could impact phenomena of type B without type A and type B having shared causal structure. Like brain lesions and memory, serotonin and happiness, or light and magnetism. — fdrake

Now I find it still a bit unclear what you are suggesting here - of course if we find that A causes B, then by that very fact type A and type B having shared causal structure. But if you are saying that all we need to find, in order to assert causation, is a pattern such that A occurs and B occurs, then I very much disagree. And not just because correlation does not imply causation, but because cause is a very much more complicated issue than this - and I'd refer you to Anscombe's paper for details. What causes what is very much an issue of how we chose to describe events, not just of correlations.

I also do not think that intentional accounts provide a theory of how brains function. I think it pretty clear that there will be no structure found in one's brain that corresponds to one's belief that Sydney is in Australia.

As a consequence I do not think that propositional attitudes are reducible to any sort of brain structure.

But if I've understood you, you seem to think that some similarity in structure between a network of propositional attitudes and brain structures would imply a causal connection, that is, intentions would be reducible to brain structure.

And this seems to be where we differ.

It'd be great to have a proper study. I went to physics review, and did a quick search of titles, finding 716,414 altogether.

Now let's set up a standard - "mass" is certainly a central term in physics. Wolfram has it as occurring once in every 12,987 general written words. My search found it in 9,257 titles, giving it a ratio of once in every 77 titles. It's clear "mass" is a key term in physics.

Now let's do "cause". Wolfram has it as once in every 7194 written words. It occurs 137 times in the journals searched. that's about once in every 5500 titles. No where near "mass"

So in standard written English text, "mass" occurs once in about 13,000 words, but in the titles of physics texts, it occurs about once in every 77 titles. "Cause" appears once in every 7000 words in standards written texts, and about once in every 5500 titles in physics Journal titles.

Of course these results are tentative. But...

Uh, even the Neo-Russelians admit that they have a major problem with how much scientists appeal to cause: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1093/bjps/axl027?journalCode=bjps — Count Timothy von Icarus

Hmm. I've no access to the article, I'm unable to see any data from the abstract, so why do they "admit that they have a major problem with how much scientists appeal to cause"?

The Hitchcock article makes much the same point I am making.

At the very least we might learn from Anscombe that cause is more than pattern, and acknowledge the place of intention and agency in our casual descriptions.

Then it would seem anomalous monism, as you've construed it, is consistent with physicalism. — fdrake

Well, yes, it is; hence the "monism"... But I would flip this and say that if monism must be true, then the only possibility is anomalous monism, hence preserving folk psychology.

He rejects that theory of intention. — fdrake

From what I've understood, I'm not in disagreement with Ratcliffe here. If the theory of intention is that intentions are somehow coded into neural networks, I very much doubt it. I don't think it likely that an MRI will one day identify the neural network for "Banno believes tea should be black".

You could get causal links without expressing a bridge law maybe — fdrake

If I've understood this, I'm not sure i'd count such things as casual - wouldn't they be closer to a neural version of "correlation does not imply causation"?

This is all a bit speculative, of course.

I read a lot of popular physics and physics articles and cause is mentioned frequently. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I've had an eye out for a few years, using test searches and the like, and while it appears occasionally in more philosophically oriented articles, its appearances in physics texts appear overwhelmingly incidental. It would be wonderful to run my suspicion through Google Ngram Viewer, or through Wolfram, to get something firmer.

What I would like to draw attention to is the different way "cause" is used in talk of scientific method and metaphysics, to how it is used in science texts. The descriptions of the movement of billiard balls mentioned above use equations of conservation of momentum, because they are far more nuanced than "A causes B". Talk of causes in physics is usually shorthand or folk talk for something far more useful.

So my ancient and now decrepit copy of Sears Zemansky and Young doesn't mention "cause" in the index. Nor does Penrose' index in The Road to Reality.

So much for it being a key concept in physics.

That's where this becomes much more interesting, and difficult. I've no choice but to acknowledge the possibility, but I'll also insist on pointing out that we are a ways from showing such reductions empirically, and also that there are alternatives, such as anomalous monism - that "perhaps (we) can't derive society behaviour from atom behaviour"...

There remains the disconcerting ideas of Ratcliffe and the like. But would that amount to physicalism? I'm not sufficiently familiar with the argument. I could see a connectionism running alongside a folk account of intentionality, but again it is difficult to see how there could be causal links between them.

Paul Churchland's work has been very interesting.

is "only physical statements are true" a physical statement? It doesn't look like it - it looks like metaphysics. So if only physical statements are true, then "only physical statements are true" is not true...

That is, physicalism would be paradoxical.

The issue is that if only physical statements are true, then what is the truth value of "only physical statements are true"?

Curious. I'd taken reductionism within the sciences as granted - that physicalism would consider all the sciences variations on physics; after all, the crux of physicalism is that everything is just physics.

I agree that there is a difficulty for physicalism in dealing with metaphysics, including its own.

Banno embodies a jester. Once you realize that his posts are easily understood. — Philosophim

If I link to this image, I'm not using it, I'm advertising Madden's web site...

I don't think this got the attention it deserves:

The statement that "only physical statements are true" is not a statement in physical terms. It is neither falsifiable nor demonstrable. — Banno

:blush:

...reifying... — wonderer1

?
How is what I said a reification of physicalism? What could that mean?

Directly to the personal attack. Nice.

But what I've said here does negate the possition you have take over your last few threads, especially the causal necessity stuff. I'm not surprised that you feel the need to resort to this.

It involves the evidence of offered by physics, surely, but also some other sciences as well. Given its relation to philosophy of mind, it’s also about biology and chemistry, for example. — NOS4A2

Sure. Physicalism supposes biology and chemistry are variations of physics.

It's a simple enough point. Explicit physics uses equations in terms of mass, time, energy and so on, not in terms of causes. I don't see a point of disagreement between us.

Hmm. What is it you are disagreeing with?

What I did was to suggest that we could simplify the issue of what "physicalism" is by sticking to physics.

It's not obligatory. But if physicalism is not about the sort of stuff that goes on in physics books, then what?

At the least, physicalism has something to do with physics.

These are methodological rather than ontic issues, to my eye. So if you are doing physics, you don't do seances.

Physicists look only for physical explanations.

So are you saying it's a rhetorical ploy? — wonderer1

More like

...being able to talk about the same thing at two different levels of abstraction, — wonderer1

...removing the unnecessary emergent stuff. Physics does not make substantive use of the notion of substance... (see what I did there?)

Maybe. It's not that there are no causes, but that the way folk talk about them oversimplifies what they are and what they do.

Oh, there's . It may be too late to move causation to a new thread.

In making predictions, doesn’t physics implicitly appeal to causation? — Wayfarer

ok, so we have something to work with, what would be an example? Here's a nice description of the physics of billiards, using formulae for conservation of momentum and so on. Nary a mention of cause - doesn't that seem odd, if physics is about A causing B causing C....? Does making the "implicit" explicit give us any advantage?

You're familiar with Russell's take on this.

Cool. I don't think this is at odds with your characterisation, here:

1) Some things are physical
2) Monism is true
Therefore: 3) Everything is physical — bert1

Idealism denies the first premise, which is what several folk here are doing. I'm working on the second, pointing out that physical explanations are inadequate for many, many of the things we do, and that we use other explanations that work in these situations.

But if I adopt a reductive bottom-up causality position — bert1

I've also taken issue elsewhere with the overly simplistic notion that physical explanations are "causal", the image of A causing B causing C and the folk hereabouts who think this an adequate description of the world. "Cause" isn't a term used in physics, having been replaced by maths since Galileo. But it lingers in meta-physics and in pop philosophy of science.

We choose... — Tom Storm

Well, there is that bit...

I'm guessing that the way the brain works when someone stops at a traffic light is not the same as the way a dog salivates at the sound of a bell. Stopping at the red light is understood from childhood, I'm thinking that few driving instructors have to explain it to their students, but instead move on to the "how" of when to press the brake and when to drive through.

But there's more here than an individual brain. The lights will fail if other folk do not also follow the procedure. SO you and I also follow the procedure on the understanding that others will do likewise - there's a group intentionality involved.

And then there is the planning that goes in to implementing this system, from the light factory to the urban planner to the magistrate and parliament.

Yet stoping at the red light is a relatively simple social institution.

The supposition is that this is

like asking someone who wrote a program in python to write it instead in machine code? — bert1

but that is an algorithmic process, and it is far from clear that brains, let alone minds and social institutions, function in such an algorithmic fashion. Some supose that the "supervenience" is still algorithmic, that

"There cannot be an A-difference without a B-difference." — frank

is a shorthand for a physically causal link, such that B is emergent from A. But human behaviour is more complex than that. You could right now lift your arm, but will you or won't you? Which will you choose, and once you have made your choice, will you enact it or change your mind? And now that I have said that, will you change your mind again? The recursion and iteration involved in your deciding whether to raise your arm or not place it well outside any calculable algorithm.

So physics is not capable of giving an account of the simplest social interactions.

Yet even if it were, if some algorithm could set out such a situation, what we would have is what we already have in our folk descriptions of how traffic lights work. Nothing would be gained.

Can you quote anyone calling herself a physicalist saying anything remotely like that? — wonderer1

The suggestion cuts out the interminable fluff of substance versus materialism versus naturalism and so on seen here.The stuff found in physics texts serves to tie down the term"physicalism".

A code of conduct (which is what traffic lights amount to) is surely reducible to physical processes? — Tom Storm

How? Show your working. In terms only found in physics.

The simplest and cleanest way to understand physicalism is as the idea that only the stuff described in physics texts is true.

Physicalism can't explain how traffic lights work. There simply is no physical description of why it is that the traffic stops at a red light, and proceeds on the green. Any suggestion otherwise amounts to wishful thinking.

The statement that "only physical statements are true" is not a statement in physical terms. It is neither falsifiable nor demonstrable.

On the other hand, when one does physics, one must look only for physical explanations. Methodologically, physicists must restrict themselves to only physical explanations.

Notions such as idealism and panpsychism bring with them their own conceptual issues, at least as dubious as physicalism.

The solution is to accept that there are different ways of talking about different subjects, that we do a range of different things in the world.

To borrow an example from Ryle, a watercolour of a mountain is not poor geology, and a stratigraphic map is not a poor piece of art. They are doing very different things, and are associated with very different ways of talking.

"Supervenience" is not an explanation so much as a description of patterns between physical descriptions and the many other descriptions we use to find our way around.

For a bit more from Ryle, take a look at Chapter Five from Dilemmas

First, even if it is true that physical theory cannot accommodate mentions of the colours or tastes of things, this does not by itself prove that mentions of the colours and tastes of things are to be construed as mentions of things existing or happening in people's physiological or psychological insides. — p. 83

Oooh. Goodby, qualia.

I ran a thread once in which I argued that adding qualia to the discussion was detrimental; that we ought talk instead of colours and sounds, since they were sufficient. Ryle seems to agree.