I had an email exchange with Philip Calcott recently about dualism; here’s an edited version. (Favouring my bits of the dialogue, of course!)
Philip: The main issue that puzzles me regarding consciousness is why most people in the field are so wedded to physicalism, and why substance dualism is so out of favour. It seems to me that there is indeed a huge explanatory gap – how can any physical process explain this extraordinary (and completely unexpected on physicalism) “thing” that is conscious experience?
It seems to me that there are three sorts of gaps in our knowledge:
1. I don’t know the answer to that, but others do. Just let me just google it (the exact height of Everest might be an example)
2. No one yet knows the answer to that, but we have a path towards finding the answer, and we are confident that we will discover the answer, and that this answer lies within the realm of physics (the mechanism behind high temperature superconductivity might be an example here)
3. No one can even lay out a path towards discovering the answer to this problem (consciousness)Chalmers seems to classify consciousness as a “class 3 ignorance” problem (along the lines above). He then adopts a panpsychism approach to solve this. We have a fundamental property of nature that exhibits itself only through consciousness, and it is impossible to detect its interaction with the rest of physics in any way. How is this different from Descartes’ Soul? Basically Chalmers has produced something he claims to be still physical – but which is effectively identical to a non-physical entity.
So, why is dualism so unpopular?
I think there are two reasons. The first is not an explicit philosophical point, but more a matter of the intellectual background. In theory there are many possible versions of dualism, but what people usually want to reject when they reject it is traditional religion and traditional ideas about spirits and ghosts. A lot of people have strong feelings about this for personal or historical reasons that give an edge to their views. I suspect, for example, that this might be why Dan Dennett gives Descartes more of a beating over dualism than, in my opinion at least, he really deserves.
Second, though, dualism just doesn’t work very well. Nobody has much to offer by way of explaining how the second world or the second substance might work (certainly nothing remotely comparable to the well-developed and comprehensive account given by physics). If we could make predictions and do some maths about spirits or the second world, things would look better; as it is, it looks as if dualism just consigns the difficult issues to another world where it’s sort of presumed no explanations are required. Then again, if we could do the maths, why would we call it dualism rather than an extension of the physical, monist story?
That leads us on to the other bad problem, of how the two substances or worlds interact, one that has been a conspicuous difficulty since Descartes. We can take the view that they don’t really interact causally but perhaps run alongside each other in harmony, as Leibniz suggested; but then there seems to be little point in talking about the second world, as it explains nothing that happens and none of what we do or say. This is quite implausible to me, too, if we’re thinking particularly of subjective experience or qualia. When I am looking at a red apple, it seems to me that every bit of my subjective experience of the colour might influence my decision about whether to pick up the apple or not. Nothing in my mental world seems to be sealed off from my behaviour.
If we think there is causal interaction, then again we seem to be looking for an extension of monist physics rather than a dualism.
Yet it won’t quite do, will it, to say that the physics is all there is to it?
My view is that in fact what’s going on is that we are addressing a question which physics cannot explain, not because physics is faulty or inadequate, but because the question is outside its scope. In terms of physics, we’ve got a type 3 problem; in terms of metaphysics, I hope it’s type 2, though there are some rather discouraging arguments that suggest things are worse than that.
I think the element of mystery in conscious experience is in fact its particularity, its actual reality. All the general features can be explained at a theoretical level by physics, but not why this specific experience is real and being had by me. This is part of a more general mystery of reality, including the questions of why the world is like this in particular and not like something else, or like nothing. We try to naturalise these questions, typically by suggesting that reality is essentially historical, that things are like this because they were previously like that, so that the ultimate explanations lie in the origin of the cosmos, but I don’t think that strategy works very well.
There only seem to be two styles of explanation available here. One is the purely rational kind of reasoning you get in maths. The other is empirical observation. Neither is any good in this context; empirical explanations simply defer the issue backwards by explaining things as they are in terms of things as they once were. There’s no end to that deferral. A priori logical reasoning, on the other hand, delivers only eternal truths, whereas the whole point about reality and my experience is that it isn’t fixed and eternal; it could have been otherwise. People like Stephen Hawking try to deploy both methods, using empirical science to defer the ultimate answer back in time to a misty primordial period, a hypothetical land created by heroic backward extrapolation, where it is somehow meant to turn into a mathematical issue, but even if you could make that work I think it would be unsatisfying as an explanation of the nature of my experience here and now.
I conclude that to deal with this properly we really need a different way of thinking. I fear it might be that all we can do is contemplate the matter and hope pre- or post-theoretical enlightenment dawns, in a sort of Taoist way; but I continue to hope that eventually that one weird trick of metaphysical argument that cracks the issue will occur to someone, because like anyone brought up in the western tradition I really want to get it all back to territory where we can write out the rules and even do some maths!
As I’ve said, this all raises another question, namely why we bother about monism versus dualism at all. Most people realise that there is no single account of the world that covers everything. Besides concrete physical objects we have to consider the abstract entities; those dealt with in maths, for example, and many other fields. Any system of metaphysics which isn’t intolerably flat and limited is going to have some features that would entitle us to call it at least loosely dualist. On the other hand, everything is part of the cosmos, broadly understood, and everything is in some way related to the other contents of those cosmos. So we can equally say that any sufficiently comprehensive system can, at least loosely, be described as monist too; in the end there is only one world. Any reasonable theory will be a bit dualist and a bit monist in some respects.
That being so, the pure metaphysical question of monism versus dualism begins to look rather academic, more about nomenclature than substance. The real interest is in whether your dualism or your monism is any good as an elegant and effective explanation. In that competition materialism, which we tend to call monist, just looks to be an awfully long way ahead.
“…how can any physical process explain this extraordinary (and completely unexpected on physicalism) “thing” that is conscious experience?”
I have long suspected that conscious experience seems extraordinary, unexpected or even miraculous to some people but not to others. It does not seem that way to me, so I have never perceived a need for extraordinary (supernatural) explanations. As for why conscious experience might seem extraordinary to some people but not to others, perhaps it a matter of innate disposition. Some people seem ‘spiritual’ and some seem otherwise in much the same way some people can have deeply moving esthetic experiences and some can’t.
Regarding what kind of problem consciousness is, I suspect we could lay out a path toward discovering an answer. The path would probably involve experiments with human subjects that would require those subjects be destroyed either during or after the experiments. The idea of treating humans as mere lab animals is so abhorrent that it rightly doesn’t even occur to most of us, but as a thought experiment, how would you go about trying to understand consciousness if you could do to human beings the kinds of things scientists do to insects or mice?
Good point, thank you for sharing. As an Artificial Intelligence researcher, I believe the answer lies in science too, but the effort for it has to be increased, which also leads one to believe in the dualism hypothesis. My view, in that sense, is that of a Remote Mind Hypothesis. For example, if we have social networks and technology today to digitally register a large part of our insights and desires, in theory, we are very close to being able, in the future, to make great discoveries in this direction, crossing only present and past data.
To me, the problem with dualism isn’t that it’s difficult to see how the two realms interact, but rather that if they do, that very fact seems enough alone to collapse them into a single substance.
The reason is that we know the world only by cause and effect; and we call physical what effects the physical. Whatever you try to strike a billard ball with is physical by virtue of producing a change in the ball, by moving it.
What about emergentism? Consciousness seems to be spread throughout a variety of living creatures, in greater of lesser complexity. Self-awareness seems to be a higher or more complex form of consciousness. Considering that humans are not the only self-aware creatures, but not all creatures are self-aware, the idea that consciousness is emergent seems likely. I don’t think this requires dualism, but it seems to transcend physicalism.
…just posted this at Eric Schwitzgebel’s, Splintered Minds 09/06/2018…
“inflate-and-explode” also suggest intentionality is unaffected in argument…
…if intention is toward one’s own consciousness…
The idea there or here is, if I can be conscious then everyone can be conscious…
…that “material” has and is purpose…
Once past singularities dualities become transitions…
…dualism may look like a state but should be worked with as things in observation (a third probably transitional state)…
It seems the problem is that people are unwilling to accept that we don’t know how consciousness arises. Maybe we will find out in the next hundred years or maybe we never will. We want an explanation and we want it now. To do so we propose all kinds if nonsense that is unsupported by the knowledge that we do have.
I believe he needs another category of knowledge, 1.5 = I think I know the answer, but I can’t prove it. If Igor Aleksander and a few others (and myself, of course) are correct, then consciousness happens when various parts of the brain process the perceived world model and use it for bodily and other functions. As computers become better able to process such a world model, the entities will exhibit consciousness. In this view, consc. is not really a dual-world thing, in that it is wholly a real part of the material world, but it’s a function or capability like no other that has been studied in any way other than first person reports. In that sense, it’s an entirely new category, as yet unrecognized by any scientific field.
I just see no reason for dualism. As for explaining consciousness, the resort to dualism is just a failure of imagination, IMHO. Consciousness is simply part of what the brain does. The difficulty is in trying to connect that to our experience of consciousness. The source of that difficulty is that we have trouble reconciling what we glean from introspection with what we understand about how the brain works. Consciousness is thinking about thinking which is already self-referential. Thinking about consciousness adds yet another level. It is not surprising it is difficult to do.
It appears that the most general form of monism there could ever be is this: every object is “something” (as opposed to nothing). In other words, every object has an identity. However, even this monism automatically generates a kind of dualism: that of relations and relata, because there can be no objects without relations between them (actually, both relations and non-relations can be regarded as two kinds of object). And as for the relations, it can be said that all relations are particular instances of the similarity relation. Further, the similarity relation automatically entails two special kinds of the similarity relation: instantiation and composition. Because when two objects stand in a similarity relation, they have some common properties and some different properties, hence they also stand in instantiation relations to properties. And objects can automatically be grouped into collections (for example, based on their properties), hence they also stand in composition relations to collections.
It seems that any metaphysics can fit into this general framework. And as a bonus, any metaphysics will automatically have a mathematical and a non-mathematical aspect. Mathematical aspect because pure set theory, which is built on the composition and instantiation relations, is a foundational system for mathematics, so mathematics/pure set theory is basically the most general study of relations. And non-mathematical aspect because there can be no relations without non-relations that stand in those relations. These non-relations, or at least some kinds of them, might well be the qualia of consciousness – because of their qualitative (non-relational/non-structural) nature while at the same time standing in relations to other objects, for example to the neural correlates of consciousness.
As an architecture of thought, dualism cannot be avoided as long as we are insisting upon understanding consciousness utilizing our own creative, vivid imaginations as a reference point. This is because our experience of consciousness is the thing, the “appearance of reality”, and not the thing in itself, which is the Reality. That statement is the grounding architecture wherein the ontology of dualism is derived. Like it or not, agree or disagree, it is what it is, and those are the facts on the ground.
“I conclude that to deal with this properly we really need a different way of thinking.”
Peter is correct in making this argument for one simple reason: Our existing forms of thought are not adequate to resolve the mysteries surrounding our existence, let alone the phenomenon of consciousness. I once posited a couple of questions to address this issue, they go like this:
1. What underwrites our current description of the structure of reality? The correct answer is: “Our own creative, vivid imaginations”.
2. Other than our own creative, vivid imaginations, what underwrites our current description of the structure of reality? The correct answer is: “I don’t know”.
Those three simple words, “I don’t know”, definitively and succinctly testify of the objective reality of the unknown, also known as the Parmenidean reality/appearance distinction, Nagarjuna’s ultimate reality, and Kant’s noumenal realm. There is a poignant irony in the objective reality of the unknown. We already know what the unknown is; it is our greatest paradox. So how does one reconcile this paradox when the unknown has no meaning? Just because the unknown has no meaning does not mean it lacks value, just the opposite is true, the unknown is value. All one has to do is engage in a conversation with any artist and ask them of the value of the unknown. For the objective reality of the unknown is the eternal spring from which all of our knowledge and creativity originates.
I think Calcott’s third assumption is wrong. Introspection is unreliable. We have many psychological studies that confirm that. So when we can’t find a physical explanation for what introspection tells us, we should remember which source of information is unreliable.
On dualism, I can see a case being made for a type of epistemic dualism. The mental model we have of our mental life is one that isn’t related to the models we have of physical systems, such the one we have of the brain. Both models can be predictive without reference to each other, that is, they can both work within certain domains, even if they ultimately model different functional levels of the same system.
In many ways, this matches the hardware / software divide in computer technology. Our understanding of software is a model that often has no reference to the underlying hardware. Indeed, a lot of software can run on multiple hardware platforms, that is, is multi-realizable, a type of technological dualism.
If people could only resist the temptation to insist that these different models represent different realities, such as different substances, dualism might not be the problem that it is.
I think, like most current thinkers, that physical dualism is dead and buried. The problem, as many have said, is that any new (not currently known) substance must interact with currently known substance to have any effect we care about. But, as Sean Carroll explains nicely, we know about *all* of the physical things we could care about in this regard (i.e., all of the physical things that could affect our brains on a daily basis).
But there is a dualism that is ontologically significant: 1.physical stuff, and 2. Patterns. As Dennett would say (has said), patterns are real.
At this point I want to join Lloyd in adding category 1.5 with a minor change: I think I know, but I can’t explain it (yet). Here’s a college try:
What if the brain is set up so that when a certain color, say, red, is in the visual field, after some internal processing, a set of neurons fires in a certain pattern, say pattern A.
Now suppose there is a mechanism that is “hard-wired” to recognize this pattern and respond by generating another pattern, and that new pattern results in vocalizing the word “red”. Now suppose this mechanism can recognize lots of patterns and respond by vocalizing words. Now suppose that this mechanism can do various other things besides just vocalize associated words. But always for this mechanism the input is a particular pattern of firing neurons initiated by events in the environment.
Okay, now suppose that we can ask this mechanism questions by vocalizing words, which words generate specific patterns. The responses to those patterns will generate vocalizations, depending on which basic patterns get started up.
The point of all this is that all the inputs (neural patterns) to the mechanism were caused by events external to the mechanism and the outputs are responses appropriate to those causes. So the significant property of the input is its (probable) causal history, and this significance is wired into the mechanism which recognizes the input and generates output appropriate to the (probable) causal history. This situation can (maybe) explain our behavior, including generating the concept that an input to the mechanism “feels” like something. The answer to “What does it feel like?” will be the word(s) associated with whatever caused the pattern to happen.
The bottom line is that no new physics is needed. You just need to understand the role of symbolic semantic information and the mechanisms designed to respond to it.
*
[See? Told you it was hard to explain]
One addition note: “Chalmers seems to classify consciousness as a “class 3 ignorance” problem (along the lines above). He then adopts a panpsychism approach to solve this. We have a fundamental property of nature that exhibits itself only through consciousness, and it is impossible to detect its interaction with the rest of physics in any way.”
I agree with the first sentence, that consciousness is a “class 3 ignorance” problem and panpsychism is the correct approach to solve this problem. I disagree with the last sentence because it is “possible to detect consciousnesses’ interaction with the rest of physics”. We observe that interaction every time we make an observation calling that dynamic interaction cause and effect, or motion and form. Wherein, what is actually taking place is not cause and effect predicated upon some “mysterious force” called the laws of nature, but an unequivocal partnership of conscious identities engaging in meaningful relationships, the same type of meaningful relationships that mature adults engage in. It’s all the same dynamic, the only distinction is a matter of scope.
The underlying form of our reasoning is defective, and as a result, we all believe in ghosts; and that is a paradigm that is hard to relinquish. There is no such “thing” as the law of gravity, as there is no such thing as the laws of nature or the laws of physics. In order for us to abandon those primitive and archaic paradigms, it requires us to develop a new “way” of reasoning, one that is not predicated upon the old model of control.
Hey guys,
I’ve come up with a new metaphysics and this is the model I now strongly favor! 😉 What do you think of this one Jochen?
The idea is that both the physical world (physics) *and* the mathematical world (mathematics) are objectively real. That is to say, physical objects and mathematical objects are real things, *out there* in reality (physical realism and mathematical realism).
Now, take the set of all physical objects. Take the set of all mathematical objects. Let the two sets *overlap* so that’s there’s an *intersection*. Then I say that the ‘mental world’ (the set of all mental objects, including consciousness) is the *intersection* of the two sets (mathematical and physical worlds)!
Then applied mathematics (computer science) is the math at the intersection! So it’s in all 3 sets. The math of computer science (statistics, computational complexity and logic) is all 3 of 1 physical, 2 mathematical *and* 3 mental!
And mind (consciousness) is also in all 3 sets (before it’s at the intersection). So consciousness is *both* completely physical *and* completely mathematical!
Physics is about dynamical systems, mathematics is about knowledge representation (meaning).
At the intersection of the two sets (physical and mathematical) you get a dynamical system that engages in knowledge representation (mental – i.e., consciousness)!
James #12 and Jochen #3
See my post above (14). You have two apparently different things… physical and informational (patterns). But I showed how to reconcile them!
Asking how dualism can work is rather like asking what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object. You simply appear to have two contradictory things (A and B). How can A and B interact? The answer is they can’t – not directly….
But there *is* a solution to this philosophical riddle.
As the irresistible force (A) approaches the immovable object (B), A (force) begins to transform, taking on some of the characteristics of an object. At the same time, B (object) also starts to transform… taking on some of the characteristics of a force! And by the time A and B meet, they’ve become identical… they’ve both transformed into something else, C! So the answer is that although two incompatible things A and B can never meet, they *can* be causally connected via. a third thing C!
The physical/mathematical world dualism I proposed above illustrates this. How did the mathematical and physical worlds interact? Through a third thing, consciousness (C)! Consciousness was the ‘bridge’ between the physical (A) and the mathematical (B)
The twist here is that C is *not* actually a distinct 3rd entity. That wouldn’t be dualism (you’d have 3 things, not 2). The twist is that C is a hybrid of A and B, having characteristics of both, it could be classified as either.
James #12
If I am not mistaken, what you are suggesting is adumbrated here
https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/Consciousness,%20dreams%20and%20inference.pdf
See the lower panel of Figure 1. (“Adumbrated” because Friston is notoriously difficult to understand.)
Consciousness is not comparable to Observation…
…like different foods (not in time) in the growth of a universe or cosmos…
Patrick #16,
Thanks so much for that link. Friston has come up frequently in my recent studies, but I hadn’t had the opportunity to read any of his work yet.
BTW, “adumbrated” was an excellent word choice, even though I had to look it up. 🙂
In that paper Friston and Hobson do a pretty good job of explaining dual aspect monism, which seems compatible with my (and Jochen’s? mjgeddes?) ontology. As they explain, physical systems can be arranged such that they have non-physical (mathematical?) properties. My go-to example is three apples, which have “three-ness” as a recognizable (and so actionable) property. According to Friston, the (mathematical) property pertinent to consciousness is variational free energy, which is a probabilistic distribution, which is statistics, which turns my brain off.
Thanks again for the link.
*
No, what I’m suggesting is not ‘dual-aspect monism’. I think there’s a physical world and a mathematical world, but they’re largely separate. Consciousness is an emergent property arising from the interaction of the two more fundamental worlds (physical and mathematical).
Consciousness itself *does* have a ‘dual-aspect’ because it’s in both worlds (physical *and* mathematical), but I don’t think consciousness is fundamental, and most of reality lacks any ‘dual-aspect’ (mathematical and physical worlds are different).
James #18
it is unfortunate that Friston’s work is so difficult to understand because he really does have something interesting to say.
I have tried to meet the mathematically challenged half-way here
http://qr.ae/TUTDDw
Is Peter moving towards exploring semantics…
If so, have the fields of semantics progressed beyond sensation…
… to include emotion and mentation as means for logic and meaning in linguistics …
I would submit that most people are dualists but many of them wont admit it. When we look at various entities we make a judgement..is there a mental being, a private subjective world hidden behind those eyes? In the case of other humans we say yes because they are so much like us. But animals, singled celled brainless organisms, electrons..we dont know. Machines..probably not. We certainly dont think air conditioners feel any pain when we kick them but we think people do. So admit it or not you are already a dualist; already guessing that your dog has a hidden world that feels the kick but not the dishwasher.
The problem is how do those private mental worlds connect to what is known in physics. That we dont know is not reason enough to dismiss what is common sense as physical theory may be incomplete. With the arrival of quantum physics the idea that a subjective being can influence the wave of particle probability is certainly a possibility.
see https://philpapers.org/rec/SLETLO-2
Two worlds: mathematics and physics. Think two tubs of water, one hot, the other cold. Physics = Hot water, Mathematics = Cold Water.
Get a third tub, half fill it with hot water, and fill the other half with cold water. Then the resulting tepid (warm) water is analogous to mind.
Do you see what consciousness is doing? It’s mixing the two worlds (mathematics and physics). Mind (warm water) is both physics (hot water) and mathematics (cold water).
Things that aren’t conscious are analogous to the hot or cold water. But as the two tubs of water mix (analogous to matter arranging itself ever more complex patterns), more and more of reality becomes conscious…. (the mixing is consciousness).
So consciousness weaves the two worlds (mathematics and physics) together!
peter
…people like Stephen Hawking try to deploy both methods, using empirical science to defer the ultimate answer back in time to a misty primordial period, a hypothetical land created by heroic backward extrapolation, where it is somehow meant to turn into a mathematical issue, but even if you could make that work I think it would be unsatisfying as an explanation of the nature of my experience here and now.
And indeed, not even an answer to all the material (“physical”) questions that can be asked. A perfectly valid question is “what IS time” ? (IS, not what can it do, nor what properties does it possess in relation to time/space etc). Physics has no answers for that question, as it’s starting point is that time exists, it has certain properties and that’s that.
The obvious question – it seems to me – is biological. Why does homo sapiens have contradictory world views – the mental and the non-mental ? Why is the cognitive apparatus so arranged ? Very, very few people it seems to me – least of all the alleged ‘rationalists’ such as Dennett – seem to want to acknowledge that the cognitive abilities of the human species might throw up insolubles, or that the cognitive capabilities of the species might be limited in some way. They think they’re entitled to an answer, and because of lot of them are – with the best will in the world – a bit more entrenched in the propaganda of physics rather than the practical realities of the the discipline, living in a world of total fantasy
J
Monism vs dualism presumes that our labels have well defined borders, and therefore mind and brain are either 2 things or 1 thing. However, they could equally well be points on a continuum of possible ways of viewing the same thing. And so, there is a mind and a brain, just as red and orange are definably different things. But you hit a Sorites paradox trying to find the exact point on the spectrum where everything on one side is red, and that on the other side is orange. Meanwhile, while mind and brain would definably two different philosophical things, it’s meaningless to talk about whether one causes the other to act, and if so, which causes which and how.
I once argued against dualism in a similar manner on a Christian website debating the existence of God. It was an argument against supernaturalism, but close enough to a debate for materialism to be relevant.
The point was that between the two worlds or substances there must be some kind of interface. Across the interface causality would flow, otherwise there would be no need for the second substance. Therefore the effects of the immaterial substance must be detectable, measurable, amenable to scientific investigation, even if the second substance isn’t. Somewhere in our brains this must be happening. One possibility is some kind of quantum effects, though this is not really a great candidate.
Quantum effects are probabilistic but well characterized. The type of interface we’d be looking at would be idiosyncratic, unpredictable and variable. Energy and/or matter would just do stuff out of the blue, for no discernible reason. However, it wouldn’t just be random noise or heat.
Nothing like that has ever been observed, which indicates dualism is false.
Hunt,
I concur that dualism is a false paradigm; however, as long as we continue to insist upon relying on our own creative, vivid imaginations as a reference point, dualism cannot be avoided, dualism will always be the underlying architecture that underwrites any description of the structure of reality. Subject/object metaphysics (SOM) is the quintessential architecture of dualism upon which all of our current forms of reasoning are crafted. There are no such things as objects and subjects, just those things we do not understand, and as a result of not understand them, we label them as objects and subjects, thereby crafting an architecture of thought that in the end suppresses meaning.
(The point was that between the two worlds or substances there must be some kind of interface. Across the interface causality would flow, otherwise there would be no need for the second substance. Therefore the effects of the immaterial substance must be detectable, measurable, amenable to scientific investigation, even if the second substance isn’t. Somewhere in our brains this must be happening.)
This is an accurate assessment, and the reason this interface where “causality would flow” cannot be detected is because this interface is too close to us. This interface is so fundamentally simple in its underlying form, that metaphorically, it sits right under our noses in plain sight and we can’t even see it. The reason? We are too preoccupied with trying to use the power of our own creative, vivid imaginations, constantly engaging in building intellectual constructs, that we’ve lost the innate ability to just be still and listen.
I refer to this incessant activity of creative, imaginative speculation, all of which is derived from the power of reasoning, the meta-problem of consciousness. It appears to be a genetic defect. The power of reasoning may be well suited for our primary experience, but the power of reasoning is the very obstacle which stands in the way of understanding. We insist upon this technique called reasoning because it imparts to our own sensibility a “sensation” of control, a sense of control which reinforces the sense of self. The phenomenal self model is a sense of self, reinforced by a sense of control, coextensive as one, with a character that is determinate and unified.
Reasoning is the ghost of rationality, and homo sapiens will not relent in their pursuit of control because it reinforces that sensation of self. The architecture of idealism, be it Western or Eastern in flavor is the quintessential manifestation of this pursuit of control. I think it would be fair to call the meta-problem of consciousness a genetic defect; and unless or until one is willing to address this genetic defect, nothing will change, because nothing can change.
Addressing defect as limitation we could ask, “limited from” or “limited for”…
Limited from one’s place…
…in a infinite field of tangent vectors would be knowledge…knowing one’s place…
Limited for one’s place…
…’from what one’s knows’, would be feeling of place…
Always toward esoteric…
The meta-problem of consciousness, which is the genetic defect in the underlying form of reasoning and rationality negates esoteric… “what is”, contrasted against “what is not and necessarily cannot be”… Parmenides: Script 9 1.28b-30: “….And it is necessary for you to learn all things, Both the still heart of persuasive reality and the opinions of mortals, in which there is no genuine reliability.” Esoteric is the opinions of mortals… Poof!!!
the apparition of knowing is the ghost… hence, phenomenalism becomes our prevailing paradigm of experience, the appearance… and the reality once again becomes the noumenal, the “unknown” realm underwriting that appearance…
#26 Hunt
“Therefore the effects of the immaterial substance must be detectable, measurable, amenable to scientific investigation, even if the second substance isn’t.”
Is it even feasible with our current technology to verify whether the activity of our brains is entirely explainable by known physical forces? Maybe there is an unknown force that influences brain activity but this force is relatively subtle (like a signal received by a radio) and since the brain processes are very complex we cannot check whether all of their details add up to the known physical forces.
Wasn’t Socrates esoteric ‘in not writing’…the chance for poof lessens…
…lessens in one’s interactions, providing more of one’s own interactions, for observation…
If consciousness is direct (not directed), as a hard problem it goes Poof!!!…
Socrates avoided the indubitable dynamic of a static written language, he was not esoteric….. Consciousness is direct, and the hard problem does go Poof!!!… but not until the meta-problem of consciousness is addressed…
…but then I Googled…
…”This is a call for papers for a symposium in the Journal of Consciousness Studies on David Chalmers’ new paper “The Meta-Problem of Consciousness”.”…a category for esoteric would be nice…”esoteric is effort to be conscious”, not easy…
We are a planet now, everything we need is here, all old ways all new ways are here in front of us, each step we take directly influences everything and everyone here, “to become conscious in this world is to become conscious of one’s own life”…
I thought “Meta-Problem of Consciousness” had suffered a model shift from philosophy to philology years ago…
The reason dualism as regards the mind is so seductive is that the mind *does* seem to have a peculiar *double-aspect*, as others in the thread are pointing out. It’s both physical (hardware) *and* mathematical (abstract patterns or software).
Now the fact that minds seem to have this odd ‘double-aspect’ (hardware and software) need not imply anything non-physical. You could avoid dualism as regards the mind by allowing that some mathematical objects (i.e abstract patterns) have an actual *concrete* (physical) existence. Very peculiar-sounding I know, but not in any way mystical or non-scientific.
It’s weird, but mind’s just seem to be a case where the abstract patterns of mathematics *do* in fact have a concrete *physical* existence. That’s why I’m a mathematical realist – I say that mathematics is objectively real (something that’s ‘out there’, not just a language invented by us).
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Hunt #26
But it has: take, for instance, Brownian motion. Tiny particles suddenly moving around, compelled by invisible forces. Of course, people then went and analyzed what kind of properties the sort of stuff that could jerk little particles around like that must have, did experiments, and found exactly that and called it ‘atoms’.
But nobody’s ever seen an atom; they’re exclusively known by the effects they have—exactly those effects that make little grains of seed jump around under the microscope. The same would happen with anything having observable effects—we’d come up with a theory about what sorts of other effects that stuff ought to have in order to produce the effects we have observed, and perform experiments. And if the theory can’t be ruled out, we eventually accept it as settled physics.
So that’s where dualism fails for me: I simply can’t see how it could both have observable effects and nevertheless be distinct from ordinary matter, from the stuff of physics—having effects on other physical stuff is precisely what makes physical stuff physical in the end.
[quote]So that’s where dualism fails for me: I simply can’t see how it could both have observable effects and nevertheless be distinct from ordinary matter, from the stuff of physics—having effects on other physical stuff is precisely what makes physical stuff physical in the end.[quote]
Correct. Something with a dualist flavor may feature in some ‘ultimate meta-physics’ as I suggest, but it’s not needed for consciousness. I do think that some abstract objects exist (platonism), but insofar as these objects are not in space or time, they can have no causal effects, and insofar as these objects *are* in space and time and *do* have causal influence, they must be ‘physical’.
I can conceive a world where dualism or supernaturalism works, but one where they were known to work beyond doubt would be a very strange world indeed. For instance, picture a world where it was quite evident that our brains really were like transmitter/receivers to some nether realm where our minds resided. This would be where there simply wasn’t enough “stuff” in our heads to account for cognition. Actually, the fact that there is quite a bit packed into our sculls is another argument against dualism, though perhaps not an air tight one. What’s all that grey matter doing up there if not the business of our minds?
Another scenario where the idea of dualism/supernaturalism might hold sway would be a world where known laws of physics were routinely violated. Matter and energy would pop into and out of existence against conservation. There would be magic spells that worked; you could conjure objects from nowhere, etc.
That there are known and accepted LAWS of physics is yet another argument against dualism.
#38 Hunt
“Actually, the fact that there is quite a bit packed into our sculls is another argument against dualism, though perhaps not an air tight one. What’s all that grey matter doing up there if not the business of our minds?”
A popular idea in New Age is that the physical body, with its sensory and nervous system, is like a perception aid for an immaterial soul. For example like a microscope.
“Another scenario where the idea of dualism/supernaturalism might hold sway would be a world where known laws of physics were routinely violated. Matter and energy would pop into and out of existence against conservation.”
Yes, but how do we know this is not happening all the time in our brains? If the non-physical influences in our brain are relatively small, how can we discover them?
There was a piece in Christianity Today last week which I think is relevant. Dr Michael Egner discusses Libet’s “Free Won’t”, Aquinas, patients of his who had very little brain and yet function normally (or close to it), and the unity of personal identity even among people who underwent a corpus callosotomy (cognitive differences only show up under specific testing), and for that matter, a patient’s ability to distinguish willfull hand movement to hand movement due to brain stimulation.
He frames monism vs dualism as Bacon vs Descartes, saying the preference of monism was a consequence of science following a Baconian tradition.
http://bit.ly/2MQOymU
How terrible it is to see these philosophical debaters only interested in discussing each others concepts, questions, speculations and tentative arguments, and guessing that some kind of problem might remain forever unsolvable, but missing the trivial fact of what makes it practically unsolvable for them, namely their method of exclusively looking inside the closed circle of totally ignorant, baseless philosophical speculations, never trying to inform themselves about and let enter into their discussion any bit of actually available knowledge from science. All these people who insist having a strong faith in physics as, in principle, they cannot see what else than the physical might be conceivably real, yet in practice keep developing such conceptions with zero idea of, and zero interest to learn about, currently available scientific facts about what the physical stuff of our universe turned out to look like. To fill this gap I invite you to initiate yourself to the philosophically crucial aspects of quantum physics by these slides I just made : http://settheory.net/quantum-philo.pdf
More comments on this ridicule of pseudo-arguments in philosophical circles : http://settheory.net/dualism
The metaphysics I propose, that is not just a speculation but a perfectly coherent interpretation of quantum physics, is kind of structured like that of mjgeddes but with positions switched: both fundamental realities are the conscious and the mathematical, while the physical emerges at their intersection. More explanations at http://settheory.net/mind-math_dualism.pdf