A clue should be in the term "materialism"--materialists/physicalists generally think that everything is material or matter as well as perhaps "forces" of matter and so on. — Terrapin Station

Really? You fall back on matter after rejecting physics? BTW, there is a reason it's called physicalism. And that reason is because physics has shown that the world is made up of more than matter, and that matter itself isn't even truly fundamental. It's a form of energy.

You're getting confused here regarding the exact content of their views with the sort of thing they were talking about. What do all materialists pre-science have in common that makes them materialists? — Terrapin Station

Mind independent, natural stuff? It's kind of hard to specify a material ontology without being specific. Thus atoms and voids, or five elements.

nd if you are, you know that materialists go back hundreds and hundreds of years, right?--long before there even was anything like a science of physics per se. So how do you make sense of there being materialists prior to the formal development of science? — Terrapin Station

Because of the Greek atomists positing that atoms and the void were all that ontologically existed. Everything else was made up of that. I suppose that Thales and Aristotle posited alternative materialistic views with water or the five elements.

But those have been outdated by the findings of science. You can't seriously maintain an old-fashioned version of materialism. We know they were inadequate. There's more than atoms and the void, or water, or the five elements.

That's got to be about the stupidest comment I've ever heard. "Just in case your physicalism isn't a deferral to the science of physics, then we have no way to tell what in the world you might be referring to by 'physical.'" — Terrapin Station

Well, what do you mean by "physical"? The world? What we sense? Reality?

Because that's not saying much. Any metaphysical doctrine can do the same.

The only thing that's required is that you think that everything is physical. You can believe that the science of physics has just about everything completely wrong and still think that everything is physical. — Terrapin Station

That is literally saying nothing whatsoever, since you're free to state whatever you want and call it physical. What would it even mean for physics to be completely wrong and yet physicalism to be true?

The science of physics is not the same thing as what the science of physics studies. — Terrapin Station

Okay, sure. But you can't argue for physicalism by positing something not part of the science of physics, and use that to defend physicalism.

So panpsychism is not physicalism, because they are positing an extra ontological property onto the world.

So you can't be a physicalist and an instrumentalist? — Michael

No, no way. An instrumentalist is not making any ontological commitments.

And one need not be a realist on logic, either. — Terrapin Station

So what? You need logic to make meaningful statements.

So how is it the case that physicalism is necessarily about "what's logically necessitated by physics"? — Terrapin Station

If it's not, then there's more to heaven and earth than is dreamt of by physicalists.

Physicalism need not have anything to do with the science of physics. — Terrapin Station

Yes it does. Physicalism is predicated on the stuff of physics being what's ontologically fundamental.

ut you don't have to be a realist on physical law to be a physicalist either. — Terrapin Station

Sure, I was just making a list. Causality is it's own deal. Arguably, laws of nature, if they're real, transcend physics.

But that is a totally different discussion, attacking physicalism from a very different angle.

What I was hoping to discuss with you in this tangent was "What does 'entailed by physics" mean exactly?" We never got very far with that. — Terrapin Station

That the physics of the world necessitates the existence of everything. Which means that particles, fields of force, spacetime, constants, and laws of nature determine absolutely what can and what cannot exist.

Which means that something like math owes its existence entirely to physics. There is no platonic realm. So does consciousness. There can be no physical identical world lacking it. And so on.

Again, it seems like you're wanting to simply rehash the old physicalism vs dualism (or whatever) argument. I'm not interested in that. We've done that a bunch already. — Terrapin Station

What is the goal, then? The OP is asking how intentional content can be incorporated into a physicalist framework. That is traditionally part of the mind/body problem.

Do you have a different approach?

Nothing can be said about nothing. And yet, we say something.

Language creating something from nothing. Is that how God performed ex nihilo?

ton of things after all, couldn't it? And that could be the case no matter how we progress with our social practices that count as that science. — Terrapin Station

Jesus man, this isn't that difficult of a concept. Is everything made up of the stuff of physics, or not?

That's saying something about the science of physics per se, isn't it? — Terrapin Station

It's saying something about the nature of the physical world, since physicists aren't God.

ou're trying to skip to the "point" or "meat" of the argument. I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in what "logically possible" or "logically accounting for" is supposed to refer to, because I'm challenging that it refers to anything significant in the argument. — Terrapin Station

The rules of the game of life plus it's initial starting position logically entail any patterns that emerge during that game. If you had a super complex game of life such that there was something akin to characters and societies, with different levels of abstraction from which one could make sense of that game, they would all be logically entailed by the rules and starting conditions.

You could make a probabilistic game of life, and then the resulting complexity could be understood in terms of probabilities.

The question is whether physics is like that for all phenomena.

So an answer would have to fit "x is entailed by physics just in case _______" and the blank would be whatever the explanation is of what the phrase means. — Terrapin Station

No, it means that if you knew everything about physics, you would know everything that could be made up of physics, whether it's realized in our universe, or not (maybe because some early quantum fluctuation didn't lead to the right conditions).

In the sense where we're talking about the "furniture of the world" so to speak a la things that can be known via experience, whether directly or not, and whether extrapolatively/interpolatively or not. — Terrapin Station

So in all possible worlds where the furniture of the world is exactly the same, do you always have consciousness, intentionality, abstract categories, etc?

How about referring to it, then, rather than referring to referring to it? In other words, how about saying what it means exactly? — Terrapin Station

It means exactly the same thing as saying that everything is made of XYZ. It's a statement of what ontologically exists, and by contrast, what does not. It's a statement about the fundamental building blocks of reality.

"Everything is math" would mean that math is the foundation of reality from which everything else is somehow formed. There can't be any exceptions to that for it to be true.

I'm not talking about "empirical" in the sense of epistemological empiricism obviously. — Terrapin Station

What sense are you talking about it in? A peculiar one where you get to say that everything is physical, but don't have to back it up with ontological considerations?

What does "entailed by physics" mean exactly? You're not saying something about the science of physics per se, are you? And otherwise, what does it mean to say that it needs to be entailed by the physical world? — Terrapin Station

This is a philosophy forum, so no I'm not talking about the science of physics, I'm referring to what the metaphysical doctrine physicalism requires.

?? Check your dictionary maybe. — Terrapin Station

That everything we know is derived from sense-experience? That's still a matter of knowledge, not ontology. An empiricist might limit their ontology to what can be sensed, but that's still too different kinds of inquiry.

Also, one can be an empiricist and a skeptic about the nature of the external world. They fit quite well together.

The first problem with this is that physicalism doesn't require a belief in (strong) determinism. One can be a physicalist and believe that some events are acausal or ontologically probabilistic. — Terrapin Station

Sure, but they need to be entailed by physics, even if there's a probability attached to it. QM doesn't posit entirely new things coming into existence, only that known existing properties have a probability wave when you measure for them.

So ontology doesn't deal with empirical things in your view? Time isn't empirical for example? "Everything is water" isn't an empirical claim? — Terrapin Station

Empiricism is a matter of how we know, not what exists. So no, time isn't empirical, except in that we know about time by experiencing it. "Everything is water" is most certainly not an empirical claim, although empirical investigation can help or hurt such claims.

The bulk of metaphysics is ontology, no? — Terrapin Station

Ontology and empiricism are two different concerns.

Anyway, I meant to edit my post to add:

As such, it needs to show how everything is exclusively physical or made up of the physical.

Consider Thales: everything is water. So the challenge for water metaphysicians is to show how something like fire is made up of water.

You can substitute consciousness for fire, and physics for water. Colin McGinn titled his book on consciousness, "The Mysterious Flame", so it's apropos.

What does it mean to "logically account" for something empirical? Sounds fancy, but I think it doesn't actually mean anything. — Terrapin Station

Physicalism isn't empirical. It's a metaphysical doctrine.

We're not simply asking whether "p-zombies are possible" isn't contradictory to itself, are we? That wouldn't tell us much. — Terrapin Station

We're asking whether physicalism logically entails all Xs. If it doesn't, then some Xs aren't physical.

Hence why I'm asking what we're saying it's logically possible with respect to. — Terrapin Station

If we're trying to determine whether physicalism is true, we can ask whether it's logically possible for there to be a duplicate physical world lacking some X from our world.

Of course, if you already know that physicalism is true, then you don't need to ask such questions. But then, how do you know that physicalism is the case?

Could you give an outline of Chalmers's position? — Arkady

Physicalism is true iff everything is logically necessitated by physicis, such that a God-like being from the Big Bang could predict what sorts of things would emerge. As such, there can be no physically identical world which differs in any way from our world.

Strong emergentism would rule out God being able to predict consciousness, societies, evolution, etc in advance. Contrast this with the game of life, where the initial state plus the rules absolutely determine all patterns that emerge as the game unfolds.

Reductive physicalism would at least require that there are bridge laws reducing (or translating) domain A to domain B to C all the way down to fundamental physics. So even though we couldn't go from the mind to QM or GR, we could find laws bridging from neuroscience to biology, and from biology to chemistry, where it's obvious that chemistry has a very fundamental relationship to physics.

Nonreductive physicalism wouldn't permit such bridge laws. There would be no way for us to reduce sociology to evolutionary biology, or what not. We couldn't bridge from high level domains all the way down to physics.

That's my understanding. And it leads right into Chalmer's discussion of p-zombies.

then it wouldn't be logically possible relative to a set of statements that includes "physicalism is true." — Terrapin Station

Sure, but "physicalism is true" is what's in question, so that would be assuming the conclusion.

I was thinking about this the other day and recently found the answer. The only completely true form of nothing in our perception of the universe is space because there are zero particles of matter in the vacuum we call space. — Fardishki

Space is something, though. It's tied in with time. Gravity warps it. And virtual particles come in and out of existence at very small scales. Also, even if a patch of space has no particles in it, it still has fields.

But most space is going to have a stray particle here or there, if not more.

Physical descriptions may be incomplete at this point, but there is substantially more physical description of what is than we find offered by dualism with regards to the non-physical.
So it is interesting to me that you feel physicalism has a hard time defining the physical. — m-theory

I'm asking in what sense strong emergentism and non-reductive physicalism are not forms of dualism, as laid out in the OP.

I ask because obviously if our background domain includes "physicalism is true" for example, then p-zombies aren't logically possible in that domain. — Terrapin Station

Is this by definition?

Nothing is all over the place -you can't just wave it away. In short: if your ontology can't cope with 'nothing', then that's a problem with your ontology. — csalisbury

Ontologically speaking, nothing has no place. But linguistically speaking, it's a very useful concept that's hard to do without. And this may be the case when we talk about ontological matters.

But supposing this means that nothing is somehow something? That's just word play. It is a cognitive distortion.

The universe (reality, the world, existence, whatever you call it) doesn't have this problem.

(1) If P-zombies exist, then there is a thing that is human and non-conscious. — quine

I would take issue with this one. A physically identical being lacking consciousness is not human. It's a p-zombie.

But then we're arguing semantics and not whether p-zombies are possible.

provided said states are understood to supervene on the physical. — Arkady

Yeah, but what exactly does it mean to supervene? According to Chalmers, physicalism require logical supervenience, which rules out strong emergentism and nonreductive forms of physicalism.

And the elimination of metaphysics from language. — Question

Good luck with that.

The limits of my language are the limits of my world. — Question

Why would that be? Do you depend on language to perceive? To feel? To dream? Are all of life's intricacies and issues captured in language? What is the limit of a dog's world, since it has no language?

Does your very existence derive itself from language?

This focus on language as the key to philosophy is an analytic obsession.

It doesn't actually liberate one from language - only silence can do that. — unenlightened

Practice Zen Buddhism, but even Zen Buddhists communicate with words, so ...

Why do we want to be liberated from language? We're human beings, and language is part of being human.

Freedom is slavery.

So is the recommendation that we change our language games in order to become more moral? Isn't that what politically correct speech attempts to do?