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Author
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Topic: James Barham: Thoughts on Thinking Matter
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Rex Kerr
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Member # 632
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posted 08. February 2003 05:34
Wow...this is a lot to respond to. I apologize in advance for the length.
I'll start with Dan first, since I think I can now say something semi-coherent (although not nearly as much as I'd like--I think I am still missing the heart of the comments).
quote:
Physicalism is a viewpoint that is on the wane. Few people defend it these days. There are many good arguments against it. Naturalism is on the rise, as you may well know.
I don't well know, but I'm vaguely dissatisfied with the distinction between physicalism and naturalism, mostly because I cannot see any good reason to separate the two. It seems as though it is either a linguistic trick, or adds some content with naturalism that we don't really understand, or already leaves something out of physicalism which is absurdly at odds with the content of the physical world.
So I share your lack of enthusiasm for naturalism, albeit for different reasons.
For what it's worth, I think that there are emergent properties inasmuch as there are recognizable-to-a-sophisticated-recognizer higher-order patterns that are caused by lower-order patterns.
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My previous point was that words ultimately have to refer to a reality, especially when used by scientists. They cannot all just be for convenience. This is just the assertion of scientific realism. It is that electrons and photons are not the only real things in the world. Theoretical entities in the special sciences also refer to real things.
This whole discussion seems more linguistic than evidential to me. Perhaps it is because my metaphysics is something like constructivism, since I can't envision how anything else has a chance of making sense. Maybe that's the source of my lack of understanding--perhaps you are working off of a model where concepts take on some sort of ephemeral independent existence as real first-class entities of the universe that urgently demand explanation.
I explain them by saying that they're not there. Concepts are an entirely different beast, as evidenced by their malleability.
From before:
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There is nothing in the phenomenon of evolution to suggest whether the causes are upward or downward or both. The only thing to suggest otherwise is the Darwinian appeal to an illegitimate ontology of 'reproduction' and to many other emergent entities which are every bit as much epistemic in substance as they are ontic. As such they are neither physical nor mechanical and may not legitimately be appealed to as if they were, or even might be!
We infer causality because of temporal or logical order. Or, rather, we define causality because of temporal sequencing. If A and B always happen together, but A happens first, and A and B seem unrelated to anything else, then we speculate that A causes B. If we manipulate a system to achieve A where it would not have without manipulation, and B reliably obtains, then we more confidently conclude that A causes B.
If reproduction and mutation happen first, then we say that reproductoin and mutation cause evolution. Why not say that evolution causes reproduction and mutation? Because when we start off with a system, we cannot get evolution without having reproduction and mutation. However, we *can* get reproduction on its own, we *can* get mutation on its own, and we can get both without having evolution. Furthermore, when we start off with a non-evolving, non-reproducing, non-mutating system, the mutations and reproduction always have to happen first. The symmetry is broken: mutation and reproduction "cause" evolution.
Where exactly is the problem here?
Okay, on to Gregg.
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It is credible that learning facts is the acquisition of information about the world. The question then arises, "Can these physical facts account for the observational information acquired in experience?" That is a basic question.
It is a basic question, but there are two very different questions that can be (confusingly) phrased in very similar ways.
Question one: Can knowledge of facts about the world perfectly substitute for experience? My answer is 'no', because the sensation of knowledge is different from the sensation of red.
Question two: Can there potentially be knowledge of facts that can perfectly describe the implementation of sensation? My answer is tentatively 'yes', because of my robot example.
Perhaps I am reading the wrong sections, but my impression is that Gregg has argued that direct experience tells you more than book-learning, and concludes that sensation is inexplicable via facts. This looks to me like an unfounded leap, and perhaps it is not the one Gregg is making.
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The first step I make is to argue that feelings impart observational information about the things felt -- phenomenal information.
I completely agree that feelings impart observable information. I didn't address this point because I agree, or at least I think I agree. There may be details that I disagree with. As long as we needn't assume that sensations are perfectly reliable indicators of what we think they are indicating, then I do not believe I have any disagreement with the statement.
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If one does not believe there are facts about consciousness we get from experience, then one's theory of consciousness is going to look very different than mine and of course materialism isn't going to seem problematic: the facts that cause problems for it haven't been admitted as explanatory targets in the first place.
Aha. I was overlooking this argument before. Now things make a little more sense.
You see, I don't trust the sensation of consciousness to tell us anything about mechanism. The world looks smooth and infinitely divisible, if only our eyes were sharp enough to see everything. But in fact, our perceptual system is built up off of a bunch of independent detectors (photoreceptors), and there is a very hard maximum limit to visual resolution. It's actually jagged at that scale. There are big holes in the visual field. The density of photoreceptors at the central few degrees of angle is vastly greater than the surround. If you tried to predict how our visual input was implemented based on everyday experience of visual sensations, you would think that someone who came up with the correct model was absolutely insane. Yet we can uncover paradoxes that highlight the limitations of the system: blind spots, minimal resolvable separations, color illusions, spatial illusions, and so on.
(Amusingly enough, with respect to consciousness, there are acts that we think are conscious (ball-catching) that can be performed when unconscious, and there are acts that we think are volitional (binding/segmenting an ambiguous visual shape to a specific resolution) that appear not to be at all.)
So sadly, from experience, I have to conclude that we may not be able to learn a whole lot about the mechanism of consciousness from everyday experiences of consciousness.
This may be such a major difference in perspective that I don't even notice that something should count as evidence when Gregg thinks it is solid and obvious evidence.
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The inference is: consciousness cannot be observed from the third-person, therefore there are no first-person facts to account for.
That isn't my position. There are first-person facts to account for, but a perfectly valid way to account for them is to map a third-person account of what is happening to what-it-ought-to-feel-like in first-person.
Fundamentally, there are no first-person facts to account for, for me, except for mine. None of your first-person facts are experieced by me at all. However, I use my first-person experience together with third-person facts to imagine what an experience might be like for other people. I do not see why I should stop simply because I have uncovered all the details of exactly how they (and I) work.
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So this is why I might "reify the difference structure as basic". It is basic, in that if I can reproduce the structure, I can reproduce the experience.
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This assertion is just what is at issue. The question is, assuming this is true, why is it true?
Well, there are plenty of examples where we can reproduce neuronal firings in a way that reproduces a normal experience. For example, probe electrodes are routinely applied to the sensorimotor cortex during brain surgery in order to be sure the surgeons know where they are cutting into. What the patient feels, however, is tingles or pin-pricks on various portions of their body.
This suggests that it may not be impossible in principle to generate a conscious experience de novo--or to interfere with or destroy one in process.
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And the question I ultimately raise in the book is, "Can a pure difference structure exist at all (i.e, is it coherent to reify it)?" And I come down on the side of the skeptic's there, proposing what I call the Carrier Theory of Causation.
Maybe I'm not sure what you mean by 'reify'. I'm not a fan of reifying anything. There are a few things that, as far as I can tell, I am absolutely forced to assume (such as that enough of my sensations are reliable in order to have coherent experience and correct the accuracy of my sensations; this implies some kind of notion of accuracy or at least self-consistency, etc.). Working out from there, with decreasing levels of confidence at each step, is an interesting process, and one that I haven't gone through in nearly enough explicit detail yet. But by the time I personally get out to concepts as abstract as "pure difference structure", I view it as...well, a very abstract model of the world, which may have the nice property of making more of my experience coherent.
Finally, William:
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In order to have "a struggle to survive" at least two things are required.
#1. A *concept* of self as separate from inert matter and other selves
#2. A positive *valuing* of one's living self-structure (and a subsequent negative valuing of the death, destruction or loss of one's self-structure).
It is forbidden, by definition, for Darwinism (a physical theory) to be propelled by a psychological dynamic. Thus, the commonplace "struggle to survive" cannot be invoked as a causative agent.
The phrase 'struggle to survive' as you understand it is not directly applicable to anything seriously believed by most evolutionists (including me).
The phrase is at best an analogy--an anthropomorphisation of a process used to instruct because humans are so incredibly good at understanding motivations and struggles and other human affairs, while really being quite wretched in comparison at thinking about the consequences of simple rules. And anyway, I never use that analogy. It's too easy for it to lead to many misunderstandings (such as that there needs to be consciousness, that evolution is an individual rather than a populational phenomenon, etc. etc.).
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Darwinism, being material, must conform to the physical ideal of Weinbergian pointlessness. That is to say, the Darwinian version of the 'struggle to survive' must be entirely derived from a physical energy potential
Minimization of energy powers biochemical reactions; these maintain life and enable movement, reproduction, metabolism and the like; some collections of biochemical reactions move and metabolize others, which makes reproduction of the original a very high-energy event. Over time, those sets of biochemical reactions whose energy minimization is consistent with reproduction continue to exist.
There's no striving or anything--the conclusions are exactly the same. It's just so much more fun and easy to visualize when we use active, anthropomorphic descriptions.
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Dan Smith
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posted 08. February 2003 07:58
I am struggling to follow the conversation on this page. It might be useful, at least for me, to employ a scorecard. Rex is the lonely physicalist here, and he is being confronted by the hawkers of metaphysics. There are two principle flavors of metaphysics and both are in evidence here: Platonic and Aristotelian.
Platonic tendencies here are represented mainly by Gregg Rosenberg (by proxy?). The Platonism is evident in his Cartesian focus on the distinction between mind and matter. The rest of us are exhibiting, to a greater or lesser extent, the Aristotelian tendency to conflate mind and matter.
By way of concreteness, consider the following statement: Canadian Geese usually fly south in the winter. Is this a scientific statement about the physical world? I think we would have to agree that it is. And as such it is on a par with the statement that opposite electrical charges attract.
As a physicalist, Rex is of the belief that the statement about geese could be, in principle, reduced to a collection of statements about the behaviors of charged particles. An Aristotelian minded naturalist would demur. She would point to the (strongly?) ‘emergent properties’ of Geese and other biological entities.
Then there are those of us who are more radical in our conflation of mind and matter. James Barham, William Brookfield and I are apparently among this latter group. We might variously refer to ourselves as vitalists, animists, panpsychists and the like. It is only slightly facetious for me to say that I am a monistic Trinitarian.
I direct your attention back to our peripatetic geese. There is more going on with them than just biological emergence, I believe. The fact that geese fly south in the winter is irreducibly intentional. You can make no scientific sense of their physical behavior without appealing to other intentionally laden concepts such as survival and reproduction. This puts us up to our eyeballs in James’ ‘teleological soup’. Struggle as they might, the reductive minded biologists and behaviorists have not been able to extricate themselves from functionalism. Physicalists increasingly turn to non-reductive naturalism of various flavors.
But then things get worse. There are us panpsychists who point our fingers back at physics and suggest that even it is not immune from teleology. We point to the quantum, the Anthropic Principle, the directionality of time, and even to the fact that opposite electrical charges attract. Physicists, too, are up to their eyeballs in the teleological soup.
Is all of this teleology just a manner of speaking? We think not. It is so only for the Platonists, Cartesians and physicalists who are able to invoke a sacred Epistemic-Ontic Divide. All the rest of us can say, “Show me!” Show us where is this Divide. Where is that Kantian line between Phenomena and Noumena? We don’t see it. Those who claim to see it are mired up to their eyeballs in their own abstractions.
That’s my present take on this topic of “Thinking Matter”.
Dan
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RBH
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posted 08. February 2003 12:23
As it happens, Rex is not the "lonely physicalist" here. There's (at least) one more (see signature below) watching with bemused interest. I'm vaguely reminded of the disputes over the role of introspection in experimental psychology in the early 20th century. According to my (now dim) memories, the questions there were about whether one's introspections - one's observations of one's own psychological innards - were reliable data. Are there imageless thoughts? Do we have direct conscious access to the raw sensations induced by the world of physical stimuli?
I also see some ambiguity hovering behind the notions of "reduction" and "emergence" as they're being used in this discussion, but that's one I'll have to watch a bit longer to get a handle on. But I'm pretty sure they're being used in different ways.
Finally, I don't agree with Dan that "Canadian geese usually fly south in the winter" is a scientific statement about the physical world. It's a description of a (more-or-less) casual observation of a (more-or-less) regular phenomenon in the world that could be (and undoubtedly was) made in the absence of any conception of "science." I see nothing about that statement or the phenomenon it describes that exalts it to the status of "scientific."
The statement that "opposite electrical charges attract," though, is a different matter. It embodies - presupposes - a scientific theory's notion of "electrical charge," and thus incorporates science into the statement of the "fact." I see it as being of a different nature from "Canadian geese usually fly south in the winter."
RBH
[ 08. February 2003, 12:38: Message edited by: RBH ]
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Mark Szlazak
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posted 08. February 2003 21:24
Dan Smith,
You and Gregg are more kindred spirits than you think. Gregg is a panpsychist and calls his position "Liberal Naturalism." His book A Place For Consciousness will be released by Oxford Press this year, but you can read it online. The two previously mentioned chapters are from there.
Proxy ![[Wink]](wink.gif)
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Dan Smith
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posted 09. February 2003 00:17
Mark,
At your suggestion I have looked again at Gregg’s book, and I do see some definite parallels with my own thoughts. His ideas are certainly relevant to this topic of “thinking matter”. It would be helpful for me to further investigate Gregg’s ideas with input from you and him. Perhaps Rex and some others here would participate as well.
We might consult with the moderator as to the protocol for this possible change of direction.
How would you compare and contrast your own views with Gregg’s?
Does anyone else care to chip in?
In the meantime I will put my own thoughts on this topic on my webpage
Dan
[ 09. February 2003, 15:13: Message edited by: Dan Smith ]
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Mark Szlazak
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posted 09. February 2003 15:38
Dan,
If your a person that believes in one reality then views like Gregg's have appeal. To me this means or is consistent with an entangling of existential levels/processes, all being dependent on one another to some degree. It's like the Zen saying "One without a second."
You could nest this in a hierarchial structure if you like and these levels could all (or some) have "mind-like" and "rock-like" qualities. Now I'm using "structure" metaphorically and as far as it goes since I believe we'll get to levels beyond conceptual and rational thought. So one may not have an ontological problem but an epistemic one. I guess I'm a mystic/irrationalist at heart. ![[Embarrassed]](redface.gif)
Another way is a "seperatist" or "dual" view which denies "one without a second" by having seperate independent levels/processes in analogy to Cartesian dualism but possibly with more than just two levels. Has philosophical problems both ontological and epistemic.
Between these two choices, my guess is that the first appeals to more scientists but since grant money is involved with their work maybe it would be the second. Also, the first appeals to some spiritualists, mystics (non-dual types), ecological movements, and religious traditions.
The second would be more appealing to other religions, ascetics, the military, exploitive coorporate intersests and associated governments and their granting agencies. ![[Frown]](frown.gif)
[ 10. February 2003, 00:12: Message edited by: Mark Szlazak ]
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Dan Smith
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posted 09. February 2003 17:46
Mark,
My main criticism of the anti-reductionists, with Gregg being one of them, is that their efforts are too little and too late. They are beating the dead horse that is materialism, and doing so with twigs. Fortunately, the poor beast is already beyond misery. That battle is basically over, except for a few stragglers out in the jungle who haven’t quite gotten the news.
The only question now is what will be the replacement. Gregg & Co. are feeling around, mostly in the dark, for leftover shards of the materialist system, trying to figure out how to put them back together in some new design. The only problem is that they don’t have a design. I, for one, am very skeptical that we can put this jigsaw puzzle back together without peeking at the picture on the box. I know that there are purist, inductionist puzzle solvers who would considers me a lazy cheat, but I believe that we have a very big job ahead of us, and that we will need all the help we can get. We don’t have the luxury to stand on all this inductionist, analytical ceremony.
We will have to use all the talents we have. One of them is our ability to grasp, with our highest powers of reason, a coherent and rational picture. This holistic power has tended to atrophy under the neglect of the analytical and deconstructive forces that operate in and around the scientific establishment. We need to revive our more holistic power of reason it by exercising it.
We simply ask ourselves: what would a coherent world look like? I think we might be surprised how much it could look like this world, if we look at it from a larger perspective. Instead of looking at our world from a mechanistic, atomistic perspective, which has become its own self-fulfilling prophecy, we look at it teleologically, and that gives us a very different kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.
In short, those of us who are serious about our metaphysics need to work out, hammer out, together a new vision, so that we can begin the reconstruction of a world that can hold itself together, instead of constantly threatening to fall apart at the seams.
Where there’s will, there will be a way. I am one of the willing.
Dan
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Rex Kerr
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posted 09. February 2003 23:35
Dan, I've owned about twenty mechanical pencils in my life. Many have been lost or broken; six have survived until now (one for over 5 years).
I do not intend to lose or break any of the pencils. Must I attribute some intentionality to the fact that some survived and some did not?
If not, please explain how this is any different from "survival" as used in an evolutionary sense.
If so, please run through the example again with radioactive decay of individual radium atoms in the spots on an old watch of mine. Is there intentionality behind which survive and which do not?
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Mark Szlazak
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posted 09. February 2003 23:56
Dan,
I can sure "feel the love" from you about reduction and materialism and sympathize to some extent, but I'm confused about other statements you've made. Gregg and Co. working with left over strands of materialism?? Holism neglected under deconstruction?? I've always thought that deconstruction was anti-structural and being structural is very inline with mechanism and rationalism. Please explain.
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Dan Smith
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posted 10. February 2003 10:29
Rex and Mark,
Yes, survival is a concept that smuggles intentionality into Darwinism. Survival entails continuing identity. Identity is very much like reproduction, when you try to parse it from a metaphysical perspective. In a purely physical sense, no animal survives more than a few days or weeks, due to the normal metabolic replacement of a high percentage of its material atoms. What survives is just a pattern, or, yes, Mark, a ‘structure’.
Mark wonders if these structures or patterns cannot just be considered as something mechanical, as in, say, the structure of an airplane. An airplane is a purely physical machine, end of story. Sorry, but the story does not end there. The airplanes in which we zip around the world would not keep flying for more than a few weeks without the constant attention of mechanics on the ground. Airplane maintenance is one of the most formally normative and teleological activities we can imagine. Machines are nothing without the nearly constant intentionality of their mechanics, operators, and, yes, passengers.
Yes, Rex, even your wooden, analog pencil exists as a pencil only so long as you or some other intentional agent deems it so. Otherwise, it is a not non-descript, decaying hunk of wood and graphite blending into its background. Any time you refer to or point to something, you are performing an intentional act to draw a distinction between a foreground and a background. That is what our speech acts are about.
To put it as starkly as possible, I am saying there is no evolution without evolutionists. Evolutionists with respect to evolution are like mechanics and passengers with respect to airplanes. You can’t have one without the other.
Ultimately there is no distinction between the word and the process it describes. It is the materialists who struggle to maintain a distinction between epistemology and ontology. Their struggle is ultimately in vein, because there is no such thing as a natural distinction. Distinction, by its definition, always entails intention.
Am I just performing tricks with words? Perhaps, but that is what life is about. The only difference between materialists and idealists is that we idealists are more honest and open about how we use words. We are more self-conscious about our use of words. Materialists were getting away with logical murder, every time they opened their mouths. It was only starting at the beginning of the last century that the analytical philosophers started paying attention to what scientists were actually saying that we were confronted by the gaping holes in the materialist logic. That Swiss cheese that was ‘scientific logic’, that defined modernism, no longer exists except as a rather quaint backwater in the turbulent, rushing torrent that is now postmodernism.
Our postmodern world no longer has any firm foundations. It is only the fundamentalists among both scientists and sectarians who desperately cling to the flotsam and jetsam of our bygone certainties.
Among these fundamentalists are the scientific cosmologists. They are the last of the Mohegans. It is my personal mission to deconstruct their cosmos. I do it in one sentence: It’s all a dream. When they say, prove it; I say, prove that it is not. It comes down to assessing the relative burdens of proof. That assessment, you will logically have to agree, is fraught with subjectivity and intentionality, which goes to prove my thesis. The alleged objectivity of the world is founded upon the subjectivity of how we decide to weigh the disparate pieces of evidence. Science may be seen an enormous and logically futile effort to transcend the limits of our subjective selves. The only logical way to transcend our personal subjectivity is by appealing to a universal subject of some kind. That is my answer to the cacophony of postmodernism. This is just theism, is it not? Not quite. This is rational theism. Much of modernity had to do with the mystification of God. I am here to help demystify and thereby reconstruct our concept of God.
I have covered a lot of ground here. My website is devoted to rational theism. I am here to work with others like you to see if we can’t get a better grasp on the ‘reality’ of our world.
Dan
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Mark Szlazak
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posted 10. February 2003 13:25
Back to Rex,
quote:
Question one: Can knowledge of facts about the world perfectly substitute for experience? My answer is 'no', because the sensation of knowledge is different from the sensation of red.
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Question two: Can there potentially be knowledge of facts that can perfectly describe the implementation of sensation? My answer is tentatively 'yes', because of my robot example.
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Perhaps I am reading the wrong sections, but my impression is that Gregg has argued that direct experience tells you more than book-learning, and concludes that sensation is inexplicable via facts. This looks to me like an unfounded leap, and perhaps it is not the one Gregg is making.
Question two is meaningful only if the ideas of "perfectly describe" and "implement" are given some content. That just takes us back to the first of my messages in this discussion, which hasn't been adequately answered yet. I have given an account of a condition that must be met by a perfect description of such an implementation and argued that the condition has not been met. The condition is that the facts about the implementation must entail the facts about what is being implemented, in the specific sense of entail I use in the book.
It seems at times that Rex is admitting the condition has not been met and is trying to excuse the failure. I'm not sure if that is a correct reading of Rex's position but that is my best take. It seems to me he is slipping back and forth between three possible responses to my imposition of the entailment condition:
(1) A failure to meet the condition doesn't matter because all we get from experience is sensation and no distinctively first-person facts, so there are no facts to be entailed by the implementation.
(2) The entailment fails because we know the two kinds of facts in two different ways. We know the facts about the implementation via "book knowledge" and we know the facts about experience from "sensation". We shouldn't expect the first way of knowing facts to entail the facts gained by the second way of knowing facts so there is no reason to be worried by the failure.
(3) There are first-person facts to account for but they are fully accounted for by the third-person facts.
I'm not sure what Rex's real position is but (1) is answered in chapter two by an argument that experience delivers observable facts. Position (2) is analyzed in chapter three by exploring the options required to make it work. The challenge is to account for the two different kinds of facts in one world model using a connection other than entailment (e.g., an identity relation). I argue that none of the known connections can do the required work and the position is ultimately either wrong or meaningless. Rex's position (3) hasn't been clearly justified yet, except by appeals to either position (1) or (2). It seems to me we need a better defense of (1) or (2) before (3) becomes a serious option.
--Gregg
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Mark Szlazak
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posted 10. February 2003 13:38
Dan,
quote:
Mark wonders if these structures or patterns cannot just be considered as something mechanical, as in, say, the structure of an airplane. An airplane is a purely physical machine, end of story. Sorry, but the story does not end there. The airplanes in which we zip around the world would not keep flying for more than a few weeks without the constant attention of mechanics on the ground. Airplane maintenance is one of the most formally normative and teleological activities we can imagine. Machines are nothing without the nearly constant intentionality of their mechanics, operators, and, yes, passengers.
No, Mark doesn't wonder that, but is beginning to wonder other things like is Dan really reading these posts and urls.
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Dan Smith
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posted 10. February 2003 15:05
Mark,
Earlier you said:
quote:
I can sure "feel the love" from you about reduction and materialism and sympathize to some extent, but I'm confused about other statements you've made. Gregg and Co. working with left over strands of materialism?? Holism neglected under deconstruction?? I've always thought that deconstruction was anti-structural and being structural is very inline with mechanism and rationalism. Please explain.
Then after my attempt to respond you said:
quote:
No, Mark doesn't wonder that, but is beginning to wonder other things like is Dan really reading these posts and urls.
I’ll have to admit, Mark, that I was not, and am still not, quite sure what the point was that you were trying to make above.
Rather than attempting to clarify your statement, however, you seem inclined to make an attack, which leaves me still in the dark about your original issue.
Lacking further clarification from you, I will attempt another decipherment of your statement. What I see are parts of several disparate thoughts somewhat cobbled together. I will attempt this time to respond to them individually.
I am making a very general statement here and on my website about the modus operandi of the ‘anti-reductionists’. The reductionists have deconstructed what we used to think was the meaning of the world, and our place in it. To quote Steven Weinberg, the physicist, ‘Life is an absurdity in a meaningless universe.’ This is nihilism, without a smile. This is what we have inherited from the scientific materialists.
I would compare the current status of the meaning of the world with the figure of Humpty Dumpty in the nursery rhyme: Humpty Dumpty has had a great fall and all the King’s men cannot put Humpty Dumpty together again. I am comparing the small army of anti-reductionists with the ‘King’s men’ in the rhyme. I am simply pointing out that they do not have a plan. Without a plan they will not have a clue as to how to go about reconstructing the meaning of our world from the shattered shards of ‘emergent properties’ and such, leftover after the ‘great fall’.
The anti-reductionists might also be compared with the Crime Scene Investigators, attempting to reconstruct the crime. They will never make sense of the scattered bits of evidence unless they have hypotheses, which they can test against the evidence. In fact, I submit that the great appeal of the CSI show is precisely how the creators jump back and forth between the pieces of evidence and the various competing hypotheses of the investigators.
With my critique of the anti-reductionists, I am prodding them to work more on the formation of their hypotheses. But I do not stop there. I specify what sort of criteria we should bring to bear in the formation of these hypotheses about the nature of reality. The overriding criterion must be coherence.
I further submit that coherence cannot be something that is piecemeal. Coherence is something holistic or it is nothing at all. Any particular statement about the world can be considered to be coherent on in the light of everything we know about the world.
Perhaps, Mark, you and Gregg were hoping that we could reconstruct the meaning of the world simply by induction and from the bottom up. I am suggesting that we will also need to use deduction, from the top down. The trick then is to use insight and intuition to make a correct and plausible initial hypothesis about the whole, in order to begin the process of deduction. The induction and deduction will have to meet somewhere in the middle, which is where most of us reside.
I must break now to pick up my son. I hope that this answers at least one of your questions.
Dan
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Rex Kerr
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posted 10. February 2003 16:25
quote:
Yes, Rex, even your wooden, analog pencil exists as a pencil only so long as you or some other intentional agent deems it so. Otherwise, it is a not non-descript, decaying hunk of wood and graphite blending into its background.
So if a tree falls in a forest, and no-one is around to hear, then it really doesn't make any sound, and in fact, it doesn't fall, nor is it a tree.
I'm afraid that this type of viewpoint fails to account for the observation that there are an enormous number of cases where we observe A, and then B--yet the relationship holds regardless of whether we watch the intermediate steps. For example, if I leave a peeled banana on my kitchen counter and watch it for 24 hours, it will start to get mushy and rot. If I leave, do other stuff, and come back in 24 hours, it will be mushy and rotting when I return.
How do you account for this?
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To put it as starkly as possible, I am saying there is no evolution without evolutionists.
There is no concept of evolution without evolutionists. However, one can imagine a scenario where there are no evolutionists and we sit as abstracted observers watching what is going on...and in this case, the abstracted observer might still decide that there was evolution.
What is wrong with taking the point of view of an abstract observer?
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Our postmodern world no longer has any firm foundations.
It never had any absolutely solid foundations, since to the best of our philosophical and scientific knowledge, we are limited in our perspective. Despite being called "postmodernism", and getting abstract concepts and language-production confused in the current iteration, this is hardly new: it's a point of view as old as Skepticism (e.g. ~300BCE).
The response that seems to work the best is the pragmatic: okay, we can't know absolutely for sure, so let's make a few conservative assumptions and get on with things as best we can. To those of us who are getting on with things, using well-established yet still tentative (in the absolute-certainty sense) theories, it is not particularly informative to keep being reminded that we don't know for sure.
Some of us knew that already. Some of us didn't. And it doesn't make much difference in how we proceed, unless you come up with a superior alternative.
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Gregg's entailment apparently meant something other than I interpreted it to mean, so I'm revisiting it:
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Let ==> represent entailment as I use it informally in chapter two and then define it in chapter three. To put the argument in your responder's terms,
Premise: To suppose there is a mechanism that implements a sensation of red is to suppose (facts about mechanism ==> facts about phenomenal red).
But the argument establishes, not (facts about mechanism ==> facts about phenomenal red).
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I have given an account of a condition that must be met by a perfect description of such an implementation and argued that the condition has not been met. The condition is that the facts about the implementation must entail the facts about what is being implemented, in the specific sense of entail I use in the book.
I suspect that I am drawing different boundaries than Gregg between what is and is not a "fact". I will leave aside the color examples from his Chapter 2, since they ignore that the different colors do have a bare difference between them (i.e. energy of the photons), thus ruining the example. There is one telling example, however:
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The skeptic can even recruit Frank Jackson s argument about Mary, the super-neuroscientist who spends most of her life trapped in a black and white room, to bolster this point. Most find it hard to deny that Mary learns something factual the first time she sees red (even if it is just a fact about a new mode of presentation for an already known fact). By knowing all the physical facts Mary certainly had all the information about the patterns of contrast and difference that are relevant to conscious sight. Yet these facts are not enough to yield, even in principle, whatever it is she learns upon first seeing red.
Actually, I do deny that Mary learns something factual in the third-person or abstract sense of fact. (I also think that the naive conception of "fact" doesn't account well for (some) philosophical and (most) psychological theories of knowledge--but I will try to skirt that issue for now.)
You see, the problem is that I do not have access to any of Mary's experiences. After experiencing Red, Mary can tell me nothing that she could not tell me before, if she had really known all the physical facts, if we assume that physical facts underlie experience. However, she has had an experience that is different than learning physical facts, because perceiving Red is different than learning about the perception of Red--and as a consequence, may believe her abstract knowledge about Red more. Mary has gained non-factual experience.
Now, if we assume that physical facts cannot underlie experience, then Mary can tell us new things about Red.
So what do we do? We have two self-consistent, yet contradictory statements. How do we distinguish between them?
Personally, I reason as such: if bare difference entails qualitative content (i.e. if physical facts underlie experience), then if we learn the physical structures and manipulate them, we should be able to manipulate experience. And indeed: people get cranky when they're short on food, there are many mind-altering drugs (some of which bind to known receptors, and whose analogs that bind to the same receptors produce similar experiences), we can stimulate various regions of the brain and produce sensation. None of this need be the case if experience is not physically implemented. In fact, if experience is not physically implemented, it is difficult to account for these observations.
Now, I might be a hardened skeptic and doubt that any collection of stuff can produce experiences at all. After all, I don't feel their experiences. But I don't feel the experiences of any other person, either. The behavior of other people makes much more sense if I assume that they have experiences also--and by extension, anything that is equivalent to said person.
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It seems to me [that Rex] is slipping back and forth between three possible responses to my imposition of the entailment condition:
(1) A failure to meet the condition doesn't matter because all we get from experience is sensation and no distinctively first-person facts, so there are no facts to be entailed by the implementation.
(2) The entailment fails because we know the two kinds of facts in two different ways. We know the facts about the implementation via "book knowledge" and we know the facts about experience from "sensation". We shouldn't expect the first way of knowing facts to entail the facts gained by the second way of knowing facts so there is no reason to be worried by the failure.
(3) There are first-person facts to account for but they are fully accounted for by the third-person facts.
I am slipping back and forth, I'm afraid. I'll try to clarify. With respect to (1), I argue that our third-person account must address both sensation and facts, so it is no escape to deny distinctively first-person facts. Whether you call them sensations or facts or something else, they still must be accounted for.
With respect to (2), I do think that there are two senses of the word "fact", and that confusion between the two of these can cause errors in reasoning. Specifically, the Mary example is only particularly telling if she can only learn book-knowledge yet we judge what she has learned by imagining her experiences. If this is done, I cry "foul", because the two are very different as experiences. (And the bare differences of neuroscience agree that they are different, due to differential activation of the limbic system, among other things.)
With the objections removed to (3), I argue that neither (3) nor not-(3) is inconsistent with what we have discussed so far, but that physical evidence about the impact of the physical world on (people's reports of) first-person sensation suggests (3) rather than not-(3).
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Dan Smith
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posted 10. February 2003 17:23
Rex,
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Some of us knew that already. Some of us didn't. And it doesn't make much difference in how we proceed, unless you come up with a superior alternative.
Ah, yes, the ‘alternative’. Yes, I do claim to have invented the better mousetrap, nay, the best possible mousetrap. That is precisely my BPW (best possible world), which is the title of my website. But before you hire a lawyer to sue me for plagiarism, I will admit that I did not actually invent the BPW. I rediscovered it. It was my old buddy, Gottfried Leibniz who invented the BPW. But Gotti was not the real inventor. It was God who created the BPW.
And, yes, I am aware that even in his own day Gotti was held up to ridicule by such luminaries as Voltaire whose ‘Candide’ addressed just this topic.
Am I afraid of the likes of Voltaire? No, because now I have the protection of Pete. I am referring, of course, to Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, the inventor of the Least Action Principle.
Yes, the LAP => the BPW, I suggest.
The physicists have reduced the universe to a manifestation of the LAP, in case you were not aware. Then Dan comes along and shows that this implies the BPW hypothesis. The rest will be history, or actually the end of history. Yes, we speak of eschatology here. Would anyone like to hear about the eschaton?
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And, oh, yes, about your rotting banana. How do idealists explain the continuity of unobserved physical and biological processes?
There are several different ways to look at the issue of continuity from an immaterialist perspective. It was George Berkeley who averred that the tree on the Quad was sustained in God’s mind when no one else was observing it.
It would be somewhat more scientific to postulate a principle of continuity in idealism. A process will continue in its normal, habitual pattern unless it is interrupted by something else. Anything else would be incoherent. Idealism explains coherence in its most general sense, which is something that physics certainly cannot do.
It would be incoherent for bananas to rot only while they were being watched. One could appeal to an extended least action principle to explain the normal continuity of physical processes.
The same principle could be applied to microscopic or atomic processes. An idealist need not have any qualms about atomic physics. Atoms must exist by logic. The Greeks postulated the existence of atoms thousands of years before they were first observed. Theoretical physicists regularly postulate the existence of particles and process before they are first observed in the laboratory. That is why physicists are very often Platonic idealists. It was in my physics courses that I first encountered Platonism.
There is nothing materialistic about the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics.” There is nothing materialistic about the Cosmological Anthropic Principle.
Where I would draw the line would be with the ETH (extra-terrestrial hypothesis). The more general principle of coherence or continuity would not countenance the random or accidental emergence of civilizations in other parts of the universe. This is contrary to the materialist expectation that the emergence of life should be a relatively common occurrence. Thus can the idealist better explain the Fermi Paradox: Why aren’t THEY here? This is also to invoke that other Leibnizian principle, the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR). In general, things do not happen without an adequate reason. We are not here by accident.
Dan
[ 10. February 2003, 21:42: Message edited by: Dan Smith ]
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