(I found a long and difficult critique by a writer called R Scott Bakker, a philosopher and science fiction author. The gist of this criticism is that Deacon fails to account for 'observer dependency', which undermines the entire premise of his enterprise. But I'll leave that for others to decide.) — Wayfarer

I'm somewhat familiar with Bakker's 'blind brain theory' and his notion of metacognitive illusions. He is an eliminativist roughly along the lines of Dennett. What do you think the idea of "observer dependency' you have imputed to him consists in and explains or entails?

Yes. Every aspect of the world interacts with every other such that no laws , rules or fixities constrain it. Instead, interactions produce new interactions which produce new interactions. The cosmos is in the business of reinventing its past constantly. The ideality of this continual self-creation does not depend on the mind of a human subject. We are simply a participant in it, but a participant who can rapidly reinvent worlds. The fact that there are no laws constraining future possibilities on the basis of a fixed in place history does not mean change and becoming means chaos and arbitrariness. On the contrary, we live in natural and social circumstances of relative stability and familiarity. One does not need a universe of already fixed properties in order to be able to anticipate new events. — Joshs

If you are denying that we observe countless regularities and invariances in the world then I think you have your eyes firmly shut. If that is not what you are saying, then I have no idea what it is you do want to say.

This is a very common axiomatic claim. — baker

It's not an axiomatic claim but an inference to what seems to me to be the best explanation.

This is indeed a very common belief about how we exist, especially in Western cultures. It's how we are often taught to think of ourselves and to take such thinking for granted. — baker

No, not simply a common belief, but a reflection on how we (or at least I) actually experience things.

As if your're not fixated by this same idea that there must be some absolute authority or lawgiver; it's just that your particular idea of this absolute authority or lawgiver is different than some other people's.
Not having such an idea would probably make one insane. — baker

I'm not fixated on the idea of an absolute authority or lawgiver, I'm simply commenting on what is uncontroversially the case regarding the atrocities that have been committed in the name of absolute authority.

Not having such an idea of absolute authority might make you insane—I can't comment on that except to say you should speak only for yourself or others who have confirmed your bias in reference to themselves.

So this modifies Wayfarer’s idealism somewhat into a play better the ideal and the real in which neither side has priority. — Joshs

This play is undoubtedly characteristic of the ways in which we conceive of human perception, experience and judgement. Do you want to suggest that it has an actuality beyond that?

This was well understood by Ludwig Wittgenstein, probably the most clear-headed philosopher of the twentieth century. One of my favourite quotes of Wittgenstein's is this one: "[Conscious experience] is not a something, but not a nothing either! (from Philosophical Investigations) — Michel Bitbol

Of course this is true, and also true of digestion, respiration, metabolism, abstraction, conceptualization, visualization and other bodily processes.

While still the human breaths the spectral homunculus looms forever...

Nice! And all these questions and stories come and go round and round...we are Sisyphus...ceaseless seers and doers of poetic philosophy...

So, the "Cave" is a nice allegory. a shadow on its own walls with no absolute meaning.

From a perspective outside both, treating mind as an observed phenomena, which we can't actually do, as we're not outside it. — Wayfarer

To say we are "inside" mind is to beg the question. We don't experience ourselves as being inside a mind, but as being inside a body which is inside the world. We don't experience our minds as being radically free or absolute but as being constrained and contingent upon our bodies, which are themselves dependent on physical resources: air, water, food, and conditions: principally gravity and light.

There are many things we cannot observe, simply because they are not observable phenomena; for example, digestion, respiration, metabolism and the precognitive interactions between body and world.

Nothing other than an expression of your own belief, or non-belief. — Wayfarer

If you look at the general history of human culture it is fairly clear that humanity has been labouring under the "aegis of tutelage", fixated by the idea that there must be some absolute authority or lawgiver. The horrific crimes against humanity which such absolutism has given rise to are hardly questionable. although of course it is possible to bury one's head in the sand in denial.

:up: :strong:

How does mind dependent on mind....not conform to your description of it being 'radically contingent'?

(leaving aside the fact that if everything is contingent, then it is impossible to avoid nihilism.) — Wayfarer

Everything we know points to mind (as an activity) being dependent on non-mind, on material existence/ existents. There are two understandings of nihilism: Nietzsche understood Christianity, and any notion of revelation, of received or imposed meaning, as being nihilistic in the sense that it nihilates the radical human capacity for creating meaning.

On the other hand, nihilism in the positive sense is simply the lack of received/ imposed meaning which grants to humanity a great freedom and creativity, The world itself, even apart from humanity, is replete with local contingent meanings, and there is no evidence for the reality of any global absolute meaning; a fact for which we ought to be most grateful, else we would be nought but slaves.

It is the fact that humanity has been mesmerized by a futile search for absolute meaning that arguably has led to the appalling neglect of this local world we share with all the other beasts and a functional sensible rational understanding of its needs.

I read it as suggesting that reality is exhaustively characterized by manifestations of matter and the absence of matter, eschewing the idea of anything transcendent of matter. Matter is able to manifest its own absence, a material absence that matters. not an unknowable immaterial presence. Makes sense to me.

We observe various activities, properties and relations of entities; so these there are indeed observable differences, and hence distinctions. between these various attributes and the entities who manifest them.

Do you deny that properties and activities can be observed?

What emerges are new compounds with new properties. Think about what happens when you combine sodium and chlorine, or hydrogen and oxygen, or the complex chains of proteins that are involved in the emergence of life. According to our best scientific understandings the phenomena we see in the Universe today are nearly all of them emergent phenomena. It's not just consciousness: consider for example photosynthesis, transpiration, respiration, digestion, metabolism and self-organization. These are not objects, they are properties and/ or activities, just as consciousness is. There are also emergent objects or entities: galaxies, stars, cells, crystals, hurricanes.

"How do you combine a bunch of building blocks and get something completely new that wasn't in the blocks to start with?" Intuitive answer is you simply don't. Same as how you don't get an ought from an is. — Count Timothy von Icarus

There are countless examples of emergence in nature. Why should we think that particular arrangements and complexities of matter/ energy cannot produce novel qualities? For a start, think about chemistry. How reliable do you believe your intuitions are on this?

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. — Banno

:100:

OK. Forget the business about DNA. There are many people in my life who I meet only sporadically. I don't know what happens to them when I'm not there; I may or may not have sporadic second-hand information about what has happened to them. When I meet them, how do I know they are the same person? (You can stipulate, if you like, that I assume that there is, in fact, a continuous causal history covering the time when I was not there. I will stipulate that I don't know what that history is.) — Ludwig V

Do you recognize them as being the same person? You might assume a "causal history", even without (obviously) being able to know the details—but does that matter? Surely if there has been a causal history, then there has been a causal history and that fact is not dependent on your knowing it, knowing its details, or on you assuming it .

Of course, you could be mistaken, there might have been no causal history, but that would mean they are not the person you thought they were, merely someone who resembles them. That would probably be pretty unlikely, though, if they were able to recount details about your shared past that you had good reason to believe only the person you thought they were could know.

The Kuhn-Popper split is one of philosophy rather than science, and the two views definitely cannot be accommodated within each other, any more than postmodernism can be accommodated within realism. They both talk about the allegedly ‘same’ world outside of our schemes, but in terms sharply different from each other. — Joshs

It seems to me that the changing of paradigms could, at least in practice, if not sociological theory, be mapped onto falsification.

You may have a more definite view without being aware of it. That’s why I mentioned the split between Kuhn and Popper on how what’s out there impacts our scientific knowledge. This difference reflects a difference in understanding the nature of reality in itself. I imagine you have a preference between these two philosophies of science. — Joshs

It seems reasonable to think that the world as experienced and understood is an aspect or function of the "in itself' (which of course includes the 'human in itself'). But I think that's as far as we can go, because we have no way of determining just how our experience and understanding relates to the in itself, except to think that it must somehow do so. That's what I mean by eschewing definite views beyond the context of human experience and understanding; it might be plausible to think that the way we experience things is related to the nature of the in itself, but there seems to be no way that we could parse that relation in terms of rational or empirical justification.

So, I don't think science has anything much to say here, as I see all of science as dealing only with things as they appear to us. I don't see the Popper/ Kuhn "split" as a significant polemic; I think the views of each can be accommodated within the views of the other.

I have read some Harmon, Bryant, Brassier and Meillassoux. I think correlationism is apt when considering the world as 'human world'; we do only experience and understand things as they appear to us. On the other hand, we are able to imagine that things have their own independent existences, while (obviously) not being able to know the nature of those independent existences. We can exercise our imaginations on that question without fear of incoherence or performative contradiction, but definite views are out of the question. That's the way I see our situation, for what it's worth.

Direct insight into saṃskara is obtainable through insight meditation (vipasyana) and other meditative disciplines. No brain scanner required! — Wayfarer

So it is believed by some—to others it is but the augmentation of dreaming.

Just to be clear, I agree with you 100%, and Hume obviously had a pragmatic sense about this too. I'm just saying that if you accept his argument about induction being unjustifiable and irrational, it strips away almost everything. You have to focus on if there is a purely deductive argument because induction, all induction, can only be justified by using induction itself. It can't be deductively justified. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree, deduction is not induction and induction cannot be deductively proven. Our faith in induction, we might say, is expectation based on habit, and also on the seemingly total lack of counterexamples. Kant distinguished between pure and practical reason. He believed that we have pure reasons to believe certain things, some of which are not merely analytic. This is controversial today, and I think a radically skeptical argument can be mounted to question our faith in almost anything you can think of.

But it doesn't seem to me to follow that just because anything, or almost anything, can be questioned on the grounds that it cannot be absolutely certain, therefore justification is impossible. I say that because we can have practical or pragmatic reasons, justifications, for holding to certain beliefs.

So, I would say that I don't agree with Russell's idea that

“there is no intellectual difference between sanity and insanity”

unless we are silly enough to believe that induction should be deduction, or that there are no such things as more or less plausible ideas.

The other point is that actual deductions themselves never deductively prove their own premises, so they can hold no context-free certainty in any case.

Could it be that maths, like space and time are part of our human cognitive apparatus in some way? — Tom Storm

This makes sense to me. Space is extension and extension implies measurability, quantity. Something similar may be said of time. Space and time are also dependent on differentiation, and differentiation entails individuation. Where there is difference and similarity there is also number and category. I think it arguably all comes down to real configurations and patterns that are reflected in our cogntions and recognitions.

What's the purely deductive argument that secures the premise "documents we possess are a reliable record of past events?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

I haven't claimed there is such an argument, but documentary evidence is all we have to go on when it comes to the past. And as I said if there is cross-referential corroboration across various documents concerning observed events then we have reason to feel more confident in their veracity. And even more so if the observed events recorded are in accordance with what we would expect based on our current understandings and the calculations based on them.

I think these kinds of criticisms are based on the claim that we cannot be absolutely certain, and I think this is a strawman since it is uncontroversial that absolute certainty, if it is possible anywhere, belongs only to rule-based formal systems.

Very good quote. Of course Hume didn't have the opportunity to understand this, but the quote suggests at least intuitive recognition on Hume's part, of how deep learning is manifested in human thinking. — wonderer1

:up: The point about deep learning is well taken; what is often ignored is the fact that the sciences present a whole interrelated network of knowledge and understanding based on observations, hypotheses and experiments which is enormously complex and consistent, and obviously that much more so today than it was in Hume's time.

These words accord very well with my own experience and views, including that I also once rejected physicalism as being beyond credibility, incoherent with human experience and even self-defeating. But I have come to recognize that those criticisms were examples of simplistic thinking, lacking in nuance as well as probably driven by wishfulness.

Hume's argument against induction would appear to apply to past events as well though. So inductive arguments about the past get the axe too. "The Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776," or "lunar eclipses have been predictable" are the types of statements we believe because we trust the source that is telling us them or because we remember the past events. However, why should we think any source of information is reliable? It certainly can't be because they have been reliable in the past. Why should we think our memory is reliable? If you cannot demonstrate that you have a reliable memory using only deduction, it seems to me like you are SOL. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't think this follows, because all the documents we have point to nature behaving in the past as it does now. For example, if we have documents stating that Lunar eclipses were observed on particular dates and if those dates accorded with the dates that we would today retrospectively calculate to be the dates when lunar eclipses would be expected to have occurred then we have some corroborating evidence that the laws have not changed. Add to that the fact that if we have no documents recording observations of violations of what we have come to think of as the laws of nature, then that also supports the belief that nature has not changed its behavior.

The other point is that induction is not so far from deduction if we frame the thinking in terms like "iff the laws of nature have not changed or do not change, then this is what we could expect to observe". The certainty of this deduction is only as strong as this premise is true.

So rather than assuming that laws are invariant I think the more common assumption is that they are good enough for now until someone comes along and points out where we messed up, and on and on the scientific project will go. — Moliere

Yes, I think this is pretty much the right picture.

Another way to read him is to say that if both Hume is right and science works, then science must not proceed by induction. — Moliere

I don't think science needs to claim that what appear to be the invariances of nature must of necessity forever remain invariant. As far as science knows they have up until now remained invariant, so it can proceed on the basis of "if such and such law remains invariant, we can expect to observe this and that or whatever".

:up:

t seems to me that supervenience is all about existential dependency
— creativesoul

I don't think it's about dependency. It's just that two things that track together: "There cannot be an A-difference without a B-difference." — frank

If that goes only one way; that is if there can be a B-difference without and A-difference then A could be said to be dependent on B.

A number of writers make a distinction between physicalism and naturalism on the basis of the inclusion or exclusion of the role of subjective point of view in the determination of the object. — Joshs

If the object is defined as 'the object as perceived' then of course it is trivially true that the subjective point of view would be a determinant. But if the object is defined as 'that which interacts with our senses resulting in perception' then the subjective point of view would be a result, not a determinant.

The very idea that our cognition should be nothing but a re-presentation of something mind-independent consequently has to be abandoned. — Evan Thompson

Of course, but this says nothing about the "mind-independent something'. It seems obvious that our cognitions are the result of interactions between minds (or embrained bodies) and that which is other to the embrained bodies.

I'm sympathetic to the idea of something like "physicalism without reductionism," but as is discussed earlier in this thread, I'm not sure such a thing currently makes much sense with how physicalism is generally defined. Physicalism might have to become just a vague commitment to naturalism and metaphysical realism to deal with strong emergence (which, to be fair, I think that's how many people colloquially use the term). — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't think the idea that everything should be explainable in terms of fundamental physics is essential to physicalist views per se, although that might be a defining feature of some reductive physicalist views.

As long as an organizing contribution of a subject can be detected in the description of physical phenomena, then a species of idealism is at work. — Joshs

I don't think this is right. Of course, Ideas can be detected as organizing contributions in the descriptions of phenomena, but it does not follow that the phenomena are pre-cognitively organized by our ideas. In other words, you seem to be conflating descriptions of phenomena with phenomena.

As I have already noted, it seems to me that the most parsimonious characterization of physicalism is simply the view that the Universe existed before there were any minds, or in other words that there have been, are, and will be existents which are not dependent at all on minds. This would not be to deny that there are potentially semantic and semiotic aspects, attributes, relations or functions of physical existents. Naturally that potential cannot be actualized without an interpreting mind.

The argument that claims that because it is a mind which says that there are existents which are mind-independent, it follows that there can be no mind-independent existents, is a very weak argument which trades on conflating what we say with what actually might exist independently of our saying. As far as I can tell this impoverished argument (in the West at least) comes from Schopenhauer.

But then we do know, from the inside, what a brain is "like" by having experience, given that experience must arise from this organ. The issue is, what parts of it are we experiencing? That's very hard to know at this stage. — Manuel

Right, we may generally feel our thoughts to be centered in our heads, but we don't, without being told or seeing someone's head opened up, even know we have a brain. Our senses of sight, sound, taste, smell and our most sensitive organs of touch are all clustered on our heads, so we have the intuitive sense that the head is central to our experience. We have absolutely no sensation that is intuitively identifiable as neural activity.

What about 'energy' or 'force'? In physics it is energy or force which is understood to cause change, which would mean that wherever you have talk of energy or force, change and hence causation is implicit.

:cool:

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. — Banno

I think your dismissal of the idea of causation as being relevant in physics is overly simplistic. One of the issues with thinking in terms of local efficient causes is that it ignores global conditions, which produces a false impression of strict linearity or "causal chains" instead of networks of energetic influences.

Causation can broadly be understood as energy exchange, without the elimination of complexity, an elimination introduced by simplistic "efficient" notions of causation, and this understanding in terms of energy would seem to be compatible with physics, with the rest of science and with the understanding of everyday events in general.

I agree with this. But I would like to add that, if we accept causality, aren't the changes in the laws of nature caused by something? And if so, isn't that cause something that we could consider to be a more fundamental, subjacent, law of nature? — Lionino

If the laws of nature have evolved then we might understand that as a kind of universal tendency towards habit-forming, just as things seems to have a universal tendency to dissipate over time. Causes are usually understood as local influences, exchanges of energy, whereas habit-forming or dissipation might be better understood as global tendencies or constraints.

That seems to me to be a uniting theme on materialism -- something, be it qualia, intentionality, mind, or spiritual things, is somehow reduced to or explained away as a physical, material, or natural process of things. (I'd include supervenience as a kind of reduction, so I mean that term broadly) — Moliere

Yes, it's a matter of perspective—I see it more as a case of those being better understood as physical, material or natural processes than as being "reduced to explained away" by that understanding. It doesn't seem to me that anything important is being lost or diminished by thinking that way.

Nice. Can I borrow this? — Tom Storm

Cheers—but, I cannot loan what I never owned.

Ah - ok. Yes, this is reasonable. I believe that the mental is another aspect of the physical though, so it's not an opposition, but your point is well taken. — Manuel

I agree—I tend to see 'mind' as a verb not a noun, and I see mental functions as one kind of physical function. The tricky part is that the physical aspects of mental functions are well-hidden from us; we don't so easily feel the physical aspects of mental functions as we might, for example, with digestion. We don't feel our brains, I mean that's why they can be operated on without anaesthetic.

Energy yes - as far as I know, I think this applies. Entropy is tricky though, is the universe an open or closed system? What is order and what is disorder? Ben-Naim has written about this, it's quite interesting. — Manuel

Right, entropy is a complex and hard concept to pin down, but I was referring just to the way everything seems to "run down" over time. the way heat disperses and things in general are dissipative structures. Thanks for the text reference; I''ll check it out,

If one does. I'm saying that 'substance' is a poor choice of words, for the reasons I gave. I'm not denying the reality of the mind.
— Wayfarer

Yes, substance is problematic and dated. But if qualified, it can be used, though it can lead to confusions. — Manuel

I think some of the confusions comes with thinking that only objects or entities exist. This may be a spin-off of substance thinking. I see minding, like digesting or running as real functions and "the mind" as a reified container metaphor.

That's a bit misleading I think. I agree with you that Kastrup, while interesting in some areas, goes off the wall with attributing "dissociated boundaries" to objects, this is an extreme extrapolation. — Manuel

Yes, I agree.

But I think we have a pretty decent idea of what mental substance, if one wants to use that term is, we have it with us all the time, it's what we are best acquainted out of anything. Which is why we can read novel, participate as jurors, pass laws, create art, etc. — Manuel

All those 'mental' things are not independent of the physical, whereas there seem to be many physical things which are independent of the mental, and it's on account of that that it seems (to me anyway) more plausible to think that the physical is fundamental than that the mental is. And I think that's what substance in the philosophical context, at least, means "that which stands under" or something like that.

The nature of the non-mental physical, is rather stranger. We only understand 5% of it, from a theoretical standpoint, even here, we have plenty of problems understanding this 5%, it's the other 95% of the universe, that we know almost nothing about, save that it needs to be postulated in order to make the 5% we do know, work. — Manuel

Yes, we posit dark energy and dark matter to make our theories about what is actually observed consistent with the math. But I'm really not referencing cosmological or physics theory, I'm just going with the more basic fact that everything seems to be constructed of energy in its manifold configurations and conditioned by energy exchange and entropy. We don't know of anything that escapes those conditions.

It's a philosophical point, not an empirical hypothesis, although I grant it might be a difficult distinction. — Wayfarer

My point was only that it does not logically follow. We are well outside of anything that could be empirically tested with this topic. Consequently, I see it as being merely an imaginable possibility that there was nothing prior to mind, but in the face of everything we experience and know, it seems implausible—to me at least.

I think that's a good way to characterise it. I think the clearest dividing line is between emergentist and non-emergentists regarding mind. When materialists or physicalists identify as such, what they usually end up meaning is that they don't think any consciousness or intentionality was there at the start.

Galen Strawson possibly bucks this trend as he claims to be a physicalist panpsychist. — bert1

Yes, I think that's right—the idea is that the Universe was not planned or intentionally created and that mind emerged much later in the picture.

'Before there were any minds' is an idea that only a mind can entertain. — Wayfarer

So what? It certainly doesn't follow from that obvious truism that nothing existed prior to the advent of mind. It might follow that nothing was experienced, but that is not the same thing.

The alternative is to avoid holding to substance ontologies altogether, which is my way of dealing with the issue.

Interesting. I can't quite see the distinction so far. — Tom Storm

As I said earlier, I don't believe there is a coherent distinction. And I received no answer from @Wayfarer in the way of an attempt to explain it. So, I am left thinking that he cannot explain it.