Don't some philosophers suggest that this comes down to the distinction between philosophical naturalism or methodological naturalism? — Tom Storm

I've mostly seen the distinction come up in the context of scientists saying they practice methodological naturalism as scientists but are not metaphysical naturalists. I'm not in a position to speak very exhaustively about what some philosophers may say. :wink:

Why do you ask?

So you're saying I can't run for President? Damn that Constitution, how dare it tell me what I can and can't do! — Michael

Yeah, it's unfortunate. I'd probably vote for you, considering the likely alternatives.

At this point I'm hoping The Rock runs. Sucks that Schwarzenegger is disqualified.

It is immoral and unjust to punish someone for something they have not done. In doing so she has violated basic human rights. — NOS4A2

It is not a basic human right to be on the ballot for POTUS. There are criteria spelled out in the constitution. Not having engaged in insurrection is one of those criteria.

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

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

Why would brains be any less shaped by evolution than other biological organs? So "What could be wrong with that?", aside from your dislike of the idea?
— wonderer1

Because evolutionary biology is not philosophy, per se, and never set out to address issues of epistemology and metaphysics. — Wayfarer

That's a non-sequitur. How about a more substantive response? Why would brains be any less shaped by evolution than other biological organs?

Philosophy doesn't need to be the sort of anti-intellectual activity you would have it be.

Also because of the role that evolutionary biology occupies in culture as a kind of secular religion. — Wayfarer

Quoting from your link:

So, what does our history tell us? Three things. First, if the claim is that all contemporary evolutionism is merely an excuse to promote moral and societal norms, this is simply false. Today's professional evolutionism is no more a secular religion than is industrial chemistry...

I am asking a scientific question. The only religion involved, is the religion you bring to the question and the only times you object to science being brought up on TPF is when it challenges your religious beliefs. Can you put your religion aside and suggest a scientific answer?

It is relevant to the fact that for you...

This is very counterintuitive. — JuanZu

But I'm happy to drop it if you aren't interested.

Maybe. I just don't see how physicalism differentiates itself from the wider umbrella of naturalism... — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't see much distinction between physicalism and naturalism, other than in usage. My impression is that "physicalism" is just the word more commonly used in the context of discussing philosophy of mind. For example, the question on the 2020 Philpapers survey is, "Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism?". If "physicalism" was replaced with "naturalism" would it make a difference?

Physicalism, consequently, when put into practice, restricts us from knowing many things and knowing many truths about the world. In this sense I think it can be said that physicalism is scientifically false. — JuanZu

Can you support this?

So maybe physicalism has never been an explanation. — frank

I'd say something more along the lines of physicalism is a label suggesting recognition of the sort of explanations that seem likely to be reliable. You might tell me that the only reason that you don't jump over tall buildings is that your witch doctor told you not to. I'm going to go on respecting the reliability of physics for an explanation.

In any case, physicalism is a philosophical label not an explanation.

Maybe it represents a certain mindset? A way of problem solving? — frank

There is something to that. I'd say it does require developing a rather nontraditional conceptual framework in order to consider things from a physicalist perpective.

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

:up:

It about being able to talk about the same thing at two different levels of abstraction, what is viewed as the emergent level and the pre-emergent level.

I'll leave it to @Walter.

It's pretty clear isn't it? Evolutionary biology replaced the Biblical creation mythology, but it also elbowed aside a great deal of philosophy which had become attached to it as part of the cultural milieu. So it seems obvious to anyone here that mind evolves as part of the same overall process through which everything else evolves. And it's then easy to take the step that the human mind is a product of evolutionary processes in just the same way as are claws and teeth. Easy! What could be wrong with that? (That's why I'm an advocate of 'the argument from reason', although it's about as popular on this forum as a parachute in a submarine.) — Wayfarer

It's a matter of facing the way things are in reality as compared to being in denial. Brains are a somewhat important aspect of our biology. Why would brains be any less shaped by evolution than other biological organs? So "What could be wrong with that?", aside from your dislike of the idea?

Do you have a scientific explanation as to why minds/brains would somehow be excluded from the effects of natural selection, sexual selection, etc?

There's an element of that, it's hard to think so otherwise, but even taking this to account, I don't see how this expands to objects being "disassociated boundaries", with people you could say that, but I don't see how this entails creates Kastrup's idealism. — Manuel

No, I don't see it as supporting Kastrup's idealism, however I can see how Kastrup's view could be an expression of his recognition of the distributed nature of evolving human understanding, in terms that make sense to him. I think Kastrup engages in magical thinking, but in an attempt to explain something real that he observes.

Where is the information and meaning of these marks? I can use a magnifying glass or a microscope to examine these pixels and probably won't find anything like meaning. It is because of this problem that I speak of meaning as an effect of an effective and active relationship between signs. It follows that nothing is exchanged, but is constantly produced as something new. Right now, when you read this, you are creating meaning as an effect of "my" words. But I am certainly not sending you anything, I am simply provoking something in you in a technologically mediated relationship. This is very counterintuitive. — JuanZu

The "meaning of these marks" lies in the way they activate pattern recognizing neural networks in your brain, and the way those recognized patterns bring up associations in your mind. We don't find meaning looking at the words with a magnifying glass, because the meaning is a function of recognitions occurring in our brains.

What is your view on possible world semantics?

So this already created world is B. How is it that the following is not saying that God creating a different world is not even possible?

I would say that it is not even possible that God create A, if God has already created B. — Metaphysician Undercover

By what Walter stipulated, A and B are incompatible, so not only is it impossible that such is necessary, I would say that it is not even possible that God create A, if God has already created B. — Metaphysician Undercover

So would you agree that means that if God is simple then he did not have a choice to create a world other than this one?

I think we're back to the beginning, and you are just going around in a circle. God only makes one of the two choices, A or B. The choice was A. So we have "God's action to create A". There is no "God's action to create B" because God did not make that choice. That is a false premise. So your conclusion "God's action to create A is the very same as God's action to create B" is an unsound conclusion because it requires the false premise that God created bot A and B. — Metaphysician Undercover

Since it seems likely that Walter is asleep...

Would you agree that there is no possible world in which God creates B and therefore it was necessary that God create A?

I think this is what I was saying above to T Clark, but one of the problems often brought forth by the substance dualist is that there is not empirical proof that brain state X always causes behavior Y because fMRI results do not show that for every instance of behavior Y the exact areas of the brain show activity.

What this would mean is that brain activity supervenes with behavioral activity 100% of the time, but the precise brain activity down to the neuronal level is variable. That means that for person A who is an exact replica of person B (down the neuronal level), the substance dualist would not necessarily commit that the two would exhibit exact behaviors. Sometimes brain state A yields behavior X and sometimes Y. — Hanover

Going through this thread and it seemed worth pointing out that fMRI doesn't come anywhere near individual neuron level resolution. The last I looked it was around 50,000 neurons per voxel (volume-pixel). It is to be expected that fMRI voxels are variable because the spatial resolution (not to mention the temporal resolution) is far too poor to detect the subtleties of what is occurring.

Thanks.

I was just trying to understand the term. I still am. — frank

What aspect(s) are you still trying to understand?

And certainly folk hereabouts missed it. — Banno

Link?

Ah. Ok. No, I am still working my way through others. Slow process for me. I started it. But I don't expect him to have the answer to the question of how consciousness can come from the physical when he begins the book by saying we don't know how:
§0.4 The deepest problems have yet to be solved. We do not understand the neural code. We do not understand how mental events can be causal. We do not understand how consciousness can be realized in physical neuronal activity.
— Peter Tse — Patterner

But then Tse demonstrates, in the body of the book, that he has looked into the sort of things that need to be looked at in order to develop that understanding. Shades of gray. Perhaps, if it is possible, for humanity to develop the scientific understanding to satisfy philosophers, it will be next century or the one after. Although, at the pace of AI development, it becomes very hard to predict.

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

I wonder if there isn't some merit to the concept, if reframed in terms of us being elements of a social species, whose thoughts are very much a function of of our encounters with conspecifics.

a red straw herring. — Janus

:rofl:

The weirdly prophetic perspective that has resulted from being willing to seriously consider physicalism.
— wonderer1

What is it? What is that perspective like? — frank

It is hard for me to communicate, because a key aspect of my perspective results from being somewhat autistic and somewhat savantish. But to take a stab at it...

37 years ago I was a young electrical engineer who had studied information processing in artificial neural networks and I was desperately in love. So I got intensely focused on issues I have with communicating and considering how my brain might be weird in some ways. (I didn't know anything about autism or Asperger's at this point, and it would be a couple decades before I was diagnosed with Asperger's.)

Long story short, I came up with an extremely speculative hypothesis about how my brain might be wired differently from those of a lot of people, and this hypothesis seemed extraordinarily powerful in explaining a wide variety of idiosyncratic things about me, in addition to explaining aspects of human thinking more generally. Since that time I have had a lot of insight into psychology and neuroscience in the sense of recognizing a lot of psychology and neuroscience as bollocks that would be replaced by a view more consistent with my understanding given time. And psychology and neuroscience has gradually evolved to be more in line with what I recognized as being key aspects of human thinking.

In fact here's a scientific finding that is a great fit with the sort of thing I would have expected to find based on my speculations of 37 years ago. I recognized the two systems view of Kahneman years before Thinking, Fast and Slow came out.

So an aspect of what it has been like is being ahead of my time, but on the basis of an intuitive 'picture' I wouldn't know how to communicate very well to someone without a background in electrical engineering. Fortunately a substantial number of people have caught up, and are surpassing my understanding by leaps and bounds these days.

Another aspect of being willing to seriously consider physicalism is understanding that we are all social primates here, although that was a more gradual process for me.

Please clue me in! — Patterner

I pointed you towards Peter Tse's book awhile back. Tse is definitely one of the less clueless writers on the subject that I have encountered. Did you read the book?

However, the Hard Problem is figuring out how the former lead to the latter. So far, we don’t have any clue. — Patterner

I'd modestly suggest that some of us have more of a clue than others, and given that it is a hard problem, it makes sense to look at it in terms shades of gray or degrees of cluelessness. :wink:

The modern physics tells us that all there is energy, Tesla agree whole heartedly. So, if all there is, is energy then there are no things. — boagie

It looks to me like you are throwing the baby out with the bath water. Some forms that energy can take are highly stable on the scale of human lifetimes. Energy in such stable forms (and particularly macroscopic agglomerations of such energy in stable forms) is what we conceive of as physical things. Might it make more sense to refine one's notion of things, rather than try to do without a notion of things altogether?

I find esoterica quite interesting, but this facet of it can make trying to discuss it extremely tedious. "Oh, you don't agree with/love x, well then you absolutely cannot have understood it. It wasn't written for you." Ironic, in the esotericists themselves have a tendency to lambast competitors in stark terms. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I find your failure to resonate with narcissists disturbing. :razz: :grin:

All these questions make (scientific) sense and can be answered by objective, reproduceable measurement. But I’m wondering if we can meaningfully ascribe measurement to “consciousness.” It seems odd to say, “There are 2.5 milliliters of consciousness here,” or “This consciousness weighs 71 grams,” or “That consciousness is negatively charged.”

Isn’t consciousness different (in kind) from what science investigates? Planets, colors, particles, reagents – these are discrete, objective areas of scientific investigation, whereas consciousness is the underlying, subjective medium through which we access all of these areas. — Thales

Note that what you describe as science doesn't seem to include the study of processes, including processes underlying human consciousness. Study of processes might be worth considering.

Wouldn't you have to argue that physicalism itself is successful? Is that possible? — frank

I'm not well suited for presenting such an argument. For me it seems like it would requiring writing a book that I would never get finished with. Fortunately, I don't have to make the argument.

But, I'll add what has been sitting unposted in the reply box overnight...

If you are a physicalist, what convinced you? Or is it just the grounding of your thinking? — frank

As grandiose as it may sound*... The weirdly prophetic perspective that has resulted from being willing to seriously consider physicalism.

*It's fucking weird to consider saying this out loud here. Not sure if I'll hit Post Comment on this one.

:flower:

How about considering it is as we believe it to be? We can experience a wonderful love or not. — Athena

I found 'the grass is greener' nature of Tom Storm's perspective and mine amusing. I'm not seeing how what you said is related.

1. Hanover is simply correct that figurative interpretations have been accepted since ancient times.

2. You claim is not in evidence, for Augustine spoke of an "ignorant individual." — Leontiskos

1. I'm not arguing against figurative interpretations existing since ancient times, as I already explained to Hanover. I'm simply pointing out that the Augustine quote itself points to literal interpretations existing alongside figurative interpretations in ancient times.

2. You seriously think that Augustine wrote that to discuss the behavior of one individual? Ok, consider the fuller quote with emphasis added:

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking non-sense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.

The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?

Reckless and incompetent expounders of holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although “they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.” [citing I Tim. 1:7]

Now, there's something that's been indirectly tackled, does your view on us not having free will, include, say, that you are forced to reply (or not) to this sentence here and does that include the ability to merely lift a finger as well? — Manuel

Well, there is an issue of whether I would have remembered to reply, which I'd guess I likely wouldn't have if @Vera Mont hadn't subsequently replied in this thread, making Vera part of the causal web that resulted in this reply. :smile:

I don't have strong objections to compatibilist notions of free will, as a matter of pragmatic necessity for beings as complex as we are. I just see a lot of value in awareness of what a compatibilist free will needs to be compatible with.

I'm unsure if Sapolsky would agree that there is felt (perhaps illusory) difference between lifting one's finger right now, and then have someone tap your finger such that it raises out of reflex. This is important. — Manuel

I'm sure Sapolsky would recognize the difference, and perhaps would go into detail about how the reflex finger raise was a result of a chain of events that didn't go beyond nerve paths between brain and spine. Whereas in the case where the finger raise resulted from someone having written a post on TPF, the causal path was vastly more complicated. It seems clear to me that Sapolsky understands that most of us model the world with our thinking playing a starring role in what we do.

This would make a fascinating thread -- invite people to describe, as best they can, what their personal "stream" is actually like. — J

Yeah, forget bats. It's challenge enough to understand what it is like to be other people.

The movie Temple Grandin makes an attempt to convey Temple Grandin's "thinking in pictures", which I guess Grandin herself found to be a worthwhile attempt at a depiction.

And I didn't know there were people without a stream of consciousness running on in their heads! — J

Not having a linguistic monolog going on in consciousness is not the same as not having a stream of consciousness. In fact, from my perspective it would seem rather impoverished, to be dependent on language for a stream of consciousness. I don't much experience a monolog these days. I used to in the past, and once (over a period of days) I experienced a knock down drag out dialog going on in my head. (Which is a long weird story.)

I'd guess "visual" might be the best succinct way of trying to convey the nature of my typical stream of consciousness, but it seems far from sufficient as a description.

That's fine - yet I think we already have instances in which people do not automatically go with kneejerk reactions. Compare the Nordic justice system with the US'. They are just night and day, one of them is much more humane, the other is just punishment or mostly based on more primitive notions.

But, as I understand it - especially the Nordic one - which is extremely little, is that both of them are based on the notion of freedom of the will, what changes is the way society reacts. — Manuel

Sure. There are many ways that humanity has culturally come up with, to deal with our innate tendedncies in a more prosocial way. Religions provide some such tools, for example Christianity and Buddhism. I wish I was more knowledgeable about the roots of the more enlightened Nordic perspectives, but I haven't looked into it and am open to reading recommendations.

Let's suppose it is an illusion. What changes? Not much. People will be prone to knee-jerk judgments and others will not. — Manuel

The extent to which people are educated, to have a more accurate perspective on human nature and how to deal skillfully with having a human nature, might change. I think this is a reasonable hope that Sapolsky and I share.

You could say that those who are more rational don't think free will is real, but then one would need evidence for this. I strongly suspect that even those who are less judgmental would not all fit into the camp of determinists, not that you are claiming this, I know.

Either way, we need data for this — Manuel

Right, and the data would require a book length treatment to lay out well.

But that quote you provided by Sapolsky looks like what others who deny free will say, especially the phrase:

"it’s very hard, and at times impossible, to uncouple from our zeal to judge others and to judge ourselves."

In other words, he lives and judges people as if we had free will (because if we really don't then how could we judge? It would be an illusion.), but then says we really don't have it. — Manuel

I haven't read Sapolsky's book, so I can only speculate on the case he makes. However, I'd say that we judge because evolution endowed us with instincts which are adaptive for members of a social species in maintaining the benefits of social living.

We do have natural impulses to see others and ourselves as blameworthy, and as the quote says, because of the instinctive nature of those impulses we can't be totally free of them. However, with a more accurate understanding of our own nature we can become more cognizant of that nature and develop skill at seeing beyond our kneejerk monkey-mindedness.

So suppose blameworthiness is an illusion/projection and we have rationalized our view of each other as free willed agents, because although simplistic, it fits with the monkey-minded ways we tend to interact with each other. Wouldn't there still be value in recognizing our proneness to such illusions, and in developing skills at seeing through such illusions. I personally find it valuable to have at least some skill at that.

Anyway, I recommend checking out what Sapolsky has to say, because I'm sure his case is a zillion times better than what I am able to say about it.