A physicalists view of panprotoexperientialism

[Big Chiller]

It come from things having bodies or being matter. It also meant qualities that were not affected by detection - which also causes problems. No one was thinking of neutrinos passing through the earth - that would have sounded more like tiny angels.

Wouldn't that be the less philosophical view of physical and the more philosophical view being that something has quantities such as size.

I'm not saying it is infinite. I am just saying we cannot say it is finite. I don't think we have a definition of physical and material anymore beyond that it means stuff exists as determined by detection - hell, it seems even deduction, though the difference gets tricky with some kinds of experimentation.

Potentially infinite is meant to be finite only basically so one can say the gravity field is potentially infinite yet not infinite.

 

[Pineal]

Wouldn't that be the less philosophical view of physical and the more philosophical view being that something has quantities such as size.

I don't know what these qualities are. Volume is the best quality you've come up with, though I am not sure we can say some fields have a size if we cannot measure it. I also wonder about particles in superposition, if they have volumes. Or quarks for that matter. I read somewhere that they were below the current ability to measure in volume so the issue is not decided.

Potentially infinite is meant to be finite only basically so one can say the gravity field is potentially infinite yet not infinite.

But we don't know it is not infinite or we wouldn't say it was potentially infinite. EDIT: I realized what you meant later.. It is an expanding field limited by time since formation. Though it is still unclear if there is only a finite amount of time behind us.

I don't think any of your arguments go against my basic idea that both physical and material have changed their meanings and now include things that would have stunned people who earlier used these terms and we do not know what kinds of 'things' and what qualities will or will not be necessary to be included in the future sets.

We have, now, things without mass, things without a clear location, things that are both singular and also multiple at the same time, that scientists would decide that there are things without volume would not be strange and I am sure it would not stop them from including them in the real. I think we have an expanding set that does not have expectations for the qualities of existent entities. There must simply be enough evidence to accept them.

I am going to leave this tangent here since it is a tangent.

 

[Captain Kremmen]

B can be formulated differently. First of all, I wouldn't say that the universe must generate conscious life, only that it's emergence is, perhaps, inevitable, given enough time and opportunity, which the universe provides an abundance of.

Further, I don't see how a universe that requires consciousness in order to begin is the only alternative to a creator god in this context. Why should consciousness come first? Why not simply explore the idea that there is something about the fundamental fabric of the universe that is simply inherently conducive to the eventual generation of phenomena such as cognition and conscious awareness?

B1.Necessarily inherently conducive, or
B2.Accidentally inherently conducive.

If B2, then we are back to case A1, aren't we?
A1. Yes, we are an incredibly unlikely outcome but here we are,

If B1, and there is no God, then why should the possibility of producing conscious life be an inherent part of the Universe, unless it was necessarily so?

 

[Rav]

If B1, and there is no God, then why should the possibility of producing conscious life be an inherent part of the Universe, unless it was necessarily so?

I don't have a problem with the way you've worded that. My only real point of contention was with your original suggestion that the universe must generate conscious life, and that such a universe would require consciousness in order to begin.

 

[Captain Kremmen]

We are probably not very apart in view.

Personally, I find it hard to believe that we are just a matter of chance, and think that the multiverse theory was invented to avoid the problem with that view.

I am left with
C1, A God, who decided for his own reasons to create a Universe which would eventually create sentience, or
C2. The alternative: A Universe with God missing, in which sentience arises directly because of the possibility of consciousness.

I don't like particularly like either of those either.
I do, however, think that religion is a vital part of human culture and faith.

 

[Yazata]

Galen Strawson's realistic materialism is one of the rare instances today of panexperiential monism classed as physical, if not a neutral monism in disguise.

I guess that the phrase 'panexperiential monism' can be spun in both idealist and neutral-monist/double-aspect ways. The difference between neutral-monist and double-aspect, in turn, may or many not revolve around idea that 'neutral-monist' suggests kind of a phenomenalism, describing all the various contents of experience as a single class. While 'double-aspect' is more realist, talking about the contents of nature itself having both physical and mental properies.

The thing is, I don't think that Rav is suggesting a phenomenalism, exactly. He doesn' seem to be trying to define the world as the contents of experience. That kind of theory slides into idealism, unless we go Buddhist and decide that minds are just as much a construction from experience as matter, leaving us with experience as reality's basic neutral monistic stuff.

I think that Rav accepts the idea that the fundamental components of physics really are ontological somehow, hence the 'physicalism'. If so, I would definitely agree with him on that. Where Rav and I appear to differ, is that he seemingly sees an insurmountable problem in deriving phenomenal qualitative experience from the arid mathematical world described by physics. So he apparently is hypothesizing that the qualitative experiential stuff might already be down there, somewhere, in the stuff of physics, arguing in effect that matter already has mental properties. I don't buy that part and prefer to imagine qualitative experience as emergent from the behavior of information processing systems.

His [Strawson's] stance at least partly seems to consist of the assertion that materialism and the experiential character of consciousness didn't become separate until a few centuries ago;

That may or may not be true if 'materialism' and 'the experiential character of consciousness' refer to philosophical concepts. (I'm certain that the ontology of the universe itself didn't change.) Our modern Western philosophy of mind didn't start to take form until a few hundred years ago. Many of the earlier medievals, Greeks and (especially) the Indians made similar distinctions, but not in precisely the way that we do today. It's hard for me to be sure how dramatically modern concepts differ from the earlier ideas.

and that conclusion of matter being a substance that (normally) lacks any phenomenal manifestation of itself whatsoever was, and still is, speculation or possibility treated as certainty -- which generates issues like Chalmers' hard-problem.

I'm not a devotee of Chalmers', but gather that his 'hard problem' is essentially this -- how do we get experiential qualia like red out of the world of physics? Chalmers wants to argue that he can generate a disproof of physicalism from that intuition. I'm certainly not convinced of that.

Strawson - "Many take the [mind-body problem] to be the problem of how mental phenomena can be physical phenomena given what we already know about the nature of the physical. But those who think this are already lost. For the fact is that we have no good reason to think that we know anything about the physical that gives us any reason to find any problem in the idea that mental phenomena are physical phenomena.” --from Neutral Monism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry

I don't understand that. Perhaps I'm missing the context.

Strawson - "Once upon a time, not so long ago, no one thought that there was a mind-body problem. No one thought consciousness was a special mystery and they were right.

I think that Chalmers' 'hard problem' is probably a pseudo-problem, the result of misconceptualizing things. (Such as imagining qualia as if they were physical things, except arguing that they are non-physical.) But like Rav said earlier, I'm not prepared to present a fully formed explanation and defense of why I'm inclined to think that. It's still a work-in-progress.

But I don't think that Galen Strawson would agree with me.

The sense of difficulty arose only about 400 years ago and for a very specific reason: people began to think they knew what matter was. They thought (very briefly) that matter consisted entirely of grainy particles with various shapes bumping into one another. This was classical contact mechanics, 'the corpuscularian philosophy', and it gave rise to a conundrum. If this is all that matter is, how can it be the basis of or give rise to mind or consciousness? It seemed clear, as Shakespeare observed, that 'when the brains were out, the man would die'.

". . . But how could the wholly material brain be the seat of consciousness? Conclusion: consciousness can't be physical, so we must have immaterial souls. Descartes went that way (albeit with secret doubts). So did many others. The mind-body problem came into existence. Hobbes wasn't bothered, though, in 1651. He didn't see why consciousness couldn't be entirely physical. And that, presumably, is because he didn't make the Great Mistake: he didn't think that the corpuscularian philosophy told us the whole truth about the nature of matter. And he was right. Matter is 'much odder than we thought', as Auden said in 1939, and it's got even odder since."

Yeah, that's probably true, but I don't think that it's very helpful.

We can and probably should replace 17th century corpuscularian physics with 20'th century relativity and quantum mechanics, but does that really make this problem of where the phenomenal quality red is to be found in the world of fundamental physics just go away? Does updating physics 300 years bring us any closer to resolving that difficulty, without our somehow putting redness into physics to begin with and waving the magic wand of quantum weirdness over it? Doing that is physicalist panexperientialism, basically. It isn't very much of a solution, just a resolution by fiat -- Red's already in there, so that's it, nothing to look at here, problem solved, move on.

People who think that way are looking for the answer in the wrong place in my opinion. At the wrong level of abstraction, we might say. It's as if we tried to explain a computer's functions in terms of the physics of computer chips. Sure, the chips and similar hardware represent the ontological level of the machine, but the functions that the machine perform center on information and what's being done to it. That's the level that I think that we need to look at if we ever hope to understand how our own experience emerges. Qualia aren't, and don't need to be, included in the fundamental inventory of physics.

 

[Dominic]

There is nothing weird about the color red. However, having an opinion about it is

 

[C C]

Qualia aren't, and don't need to be, included in the fundamental inventory of physics.

Qualia are more a squabble, anyway, over the presented content of consciousness or perception. The disputes over how this and that content should be properly classified distracts from the "how" of any image, sound, odor, or feeling becoming present or manifested to begin with. That is, when people conclude that they immutably know everything about matter -- at any level of its organization -- and that one of the items which they know is that matter over 99.999... percent of the universe functions and exists in a figurative "dark, silent, unfelt nothing". With the tiny leftover referring to brains. An example of this ubiquitous "blind matter" conclusion from Erwin Schroedinger:

"But it [the material world] certainly does not become manifest by its mere existence. Its becoming manifest is conditional on very special goings-on in very special parts of this very world, namely on certain events that happen in a brain. That is an inordinately peculiar kind of implication, which prompts the question: What particular properties distinguish these brain processes and enable them to produce the manifestation? Can we guess which material processes have this power, which not? Or simple: What kind of material process is directly associated with consciousness?"

People who think that way are looking for the answer in the wrong place in my opinion. At the wrong level of abstraction, we might say. It's as if we tried to explain a computer's functions in terms of the physics of computer chips. Sure, the chips and similar hardware represent the ontological level of the machine, but the functions that the machine perform center on information and what's being done to it. That's the level that I think that we need to look at if we ever hope to understand how our own experience emerges.

John Searle's bio-naturalism is one of those views which holds that consciousness has to do with an overall state that a higher organization of matter is in -- in this case the brain. More fundamental agencies cause the higher order system and the latter either is in a state of or in turn causes consciousness. Though he believes they are causally reducible, he asserts that states of consciousness are not ontologically reducible to lower-order material properties, entities, forces, etc. He claims bio-naturalism differs from property dualism in that he doesn't ascribe a "non-physical" classification to these irreducible states of consciousness:

Searle, from Why I Am Not A Property Dualist . . . "Both materialism and dualism are trying to say something true, but they both wind up saying something false. The materialist is trying to say, truly, that the universe consists entirely of material phenomena such as physical particles in fields of force. But he ends up saying, falsely, that irreducible states of consciousness do not exist. The dualist is trying to say, truly, that ontologically irreducible states of consciousness do exist, but he ends up saying, falsely, that these are not ordinary parts of the physical world. The trick is to state the truth in each view without saying the falsehood.

"To do that we have to challenge the assumptions behind the traditional vocabulary. The traditional vocabulary is based on the assumption that if something is a state of consciousness in the strict sense — it is inner, qualitative, subjective, etc. — then it cannot in those very respects be physical or material. And conversely if something is physical or material then it cannot in its physical or material respects be a state of consciousness.

"Once you abandon the assumptions behind the traditional vocabulary it is not hard to state the truth. The universe does consist entirely in physical particles in fields of force (or whatever the ultimately true physics discovers), these are typically organized into systems, some of the systems are biological, and some of the biological systems are conscious. Consciousness is thus an ordinary feature of certain biological systems, in the same way that photosynthesis, digestion, and lactation are ordinary features of biological systems."

But Searle himself admits that we still don't know how the brain does it. I'd personally refine that lack, though, to being purely in regard to the phenomenal manifestations exhibited in extrospection and introspection rather than the other items classified under "consciousness". Which inventions like computers, robots, autonomous vehicles, and any virtual alife programs have surely already demonstrated at least primitive examples of.

The brain isn't composed of "special matter", but the same stuff of any other system (whether television or tree or solar system or atom) -- ergo, the question of what precursor characteristic of matter is the brain using that the others aren't? A refrigerator works not just because it is engineered specifically for producing an internal frigid environment, but because certain physical traits already existed that its scheme of connections and parts are utilizing to enable such to be possible. Whether natural or artificial, there is little evidence of a magical-like brand of emergence involved in these other complex upper-level systems found elsewhere, so why do we find it acceptable for the brain to be left appearing that way to many critics?

This is where Strawson's reminder that our knowledge of matter is mutable, rather than statically dogmatic, becomes relevant. We actually don't know everything about matter, even in this era. So concluding ahead of time that a protopan-whatever (a precursor) not only is not the case but will forever be unnecessary in a satisfying explanation of consciousness is perhaps like feeling that an explanation of an electric refrigerator can be stopped at the point of its schematic diagram. Only referring to the functional relationships, as if it would be obvious how the thing could produce its internal frigidness by its organizational structure alone, minus a supply and manipulation of electricity and a circulating chemical with semi-unique properties ever being mentioned / posited.

 

[Rav]

I think that lots of panpsychists adopt the position because of a basic gut-level intuition that they possess. In a word, they can't imagine how a quale like the experience of red can possibly arise from the stuff of physics, from masses, charges, motions and similar things that, so they insist, aren't colored at all. It just seems intuitively obvious to them that qualia can't be reduced like that. So if this kind of philosopher doesn't want to be a mind-body dualist, then he or she seems naturally propelled into some variety of panpsychism in which natural objects are held to possess not only physical but also mental properties.

I don't think physicality has mental properties. Certainly not in the 'of the mind' sense of the word. I would only suggest that it is a precursor to such things. What I am essentially doing here is taking the most conservative formulation of panpsychism and dragging it as close to physicalism as you possibly can. If I'm doing my job properly, there should barely be a trace of panpsychism left, and the physicalist would need only to embrace a very subtle idea related to the essential nature of physicality: that it is inherently possible for it to manifest as consciousness. This is distinct from the idea that it is inherently possible for it to manifest in a way that allows consciousness to emerge.

I'm tempted to ramble on some more at this point, because I'm all too aware of the additional questions such a position gives rise to. But trying to preemptively address them is going to do my head in, so I'm just going to leave it here for now. Hopefully I've provided at least something of a clarification.

 

[Gustav]

best thread ever

 

[Aqueous Id]

What is "physical" but the perception (virtual) of -mostly- particles (virtual) and influences upon them -force, heat, etc.- (influences?) so I can't converge to a comfort zone with the distinction.

 

[Pineal]

I don't think physicality has mental properties.

All the words we use to describe physicality, including that word, are words that fit mental experiences and created by experiencers. So any qualities we refer to with those words are heavily tainted by mentality.

I have a magical camera. Everything I know about the world is through photographs. These are all illusions.

The witness may step down, he is of no use to us.

 

[Rav]

All the words we use to describe physicality, including that word, are words that fit mental experiences and created by experiencers. So any qualities we refer to with those words are heavily tainted by mentality.

Sure, but that's different from saying that an electron has mental properties independently of whatever we might have to say about it.

 

[Pineal]

Sure, but that's different from saying that an electron has mental properties independently of whatever we might have to say about it.

I don't think the issue is so simple. That word electron if filled with mental qualities. A monist could argue that you are, against Occam's Razor, positing two separate entities - the perceptual world and the physical world outside it. Then you use all these words that only mean things in the former , merely virtual world, AS IF they somehow describe what is outside it, in the other world, the real one. Even if this model is correct, you then don't really get to say much about the 'real world' out there, at least objectively, since we have no such language.

What you are referring to, this electron, what that means to you, is not simply out there. You are really referring to experiences, however repeatable.

 

[Rav]

What you are referring to, this electron, what that means to you, is not simply out there. You are really referring to experiences, however repeatable.

Nevertheless, I feel I can legitimately draw a distinction between my conception of an electron with mental properties, and my conception of an electron without mental properties.

 

[wynn]

All the words we use to describe physicality, including that word, are words that fit mental experiences and created by experiencers.

How do you know this is true?
How could we test it?

 

[wynn]

Nevertheless, I feel I can legitimately draw a distinction between my conception of an electron with mental properties, and my conception of an electron without mental properties.

How do you know that if you wouldn't think (and wouldn't have the concept "electron") that there would still be that electron?

 

[wynn]

I think that it's the humane thing to do in ordinary every-day discourse.

But if the message is that people shouldn't be discussing physicalism at all, even in a philosophy forum here on what is ostensibly a science discussion board, then I couldn't disagree more strongly.

I don't believe that the truth or falsity of factual propositions is governed by whether or not people emotionally like the ideas. Sometimes the truth can turn out to be something that we really don't want to hear. And when that's the case, telling the truth isn't always an act of unkindness and denial is rarely the best response.

If some form of physicalism is to be considered as able to explain consciousness, then it also needs to explain how come many people feel demeaned by said physicalism. That is all I am asking.

Conversely, since some people feel uncomfortable about some form of psychism or other, said psychism should explain that discomfort.

 

[Rav]

How do you know that if you wouldn't think (and wouldn't have the concept "electron") that there would still be that electron?

I freely admit that I can't be absolutely certain that the universe (and by extension, an electron) is an entity that exists independently of my own conception of it.

 

[Yazata]

I don't think physicality has mental properties. Certainly not in the 'of the mind' sense of the word. I would only suggest that it is a precursor to such things.

I'm pretty well convinced that consciousness or its contents aren't things in an ontological sense. They aren't kinds of stuff in quite the same way that the objects of physics are. I'm more inclined to think of consciousness as a class of causal events that occur in systems that in turn are composed of the physical things.

So yeah, in that sense I'll happily agree with you that physicality is a 'precurser' to "mental" events.

I'm not convinced that you will agree with that spin on things though. I sense that you're saying something else.

What I am essentially doing here is taking the most conservative formulation of panpsychism and dragging it as close to physicalism as you possibly can. If I'm doing my job properly, there should barely be a trace of panpsychism left, and the physicalist would need only to embrace a very subtle idea related to the essential nature of physicality: that it is inherently possible for it to manifest as consciousness.

I wouldn't disagree with that. But I don't embrace panpsychism either.

For me, physicality obviously has the ability to form itself into systems that display 'mental' or 'conscious' behavior. (We're proof of that.) It might be able to do lots of other things as well, things that human beings know absolutely nothing about.

But I don't think that's because there is some fundamental quality of mentality or consciousness already lurking inside all of matter. It's like Legos -- kids can make all kinds of things out of Legos, but that doesn't mean that everything that they make is already present in embryo form inside each Lego piece.