It's literally like this:
Materialists/Physicalists: "The thoughts in your head come from your conditions and are ultimately the result of your organs and nervous system. Your consciousness is linked to your brain activity and other parts of your body interacting with the physical real world."
Dualists: "Ok but what if there were an imaginary zombie that has the same organs and molecular structure as a living person but somehow isn't alive on some metaphysical level. If this zombie is conceivable, that means it must be metaphysically true somehow."
Materialists: "That's circular and imaginary, isn't it?"
Other dualists: "Ok but what if I were in a swamp and lightning strikes a tree and magically creates a copy of me but it's not actually me because it doesn't have my soul."
Am I reading this stuff wrong or are these actually the best arguments for mind-body dualism
dualists and mechanistic materialists alike need to read up on emergence / emergent phenomena
complex arrangements of simple things can produce new mechanisms that are greater and more novel than their parts. consciousness is a great example of this. just because it's currently too complex to fully define and pinpoint doesn't mean it doesn't exist, or exists separate from the body that it emerges from.
this is the mechanistic materialist position phrased slightly differently.
This is the main framing I've seen of physicalism. What's the "normal" account?
I don't think anybody really knows. There's like 10 strains of physicalism and they all use slightly different words to say the same thing. The only one that says something slightly different is physicalist panpsychism that states consciousness is stored in the
ballsatoms.In my reading mechanistic materialism connotes ignoring the dialectical nature of something, in this case consciousness. I'm claiming that consciousness arises out of simpler material forces, but as a complex entity with properties that are new and distinct from its parts, and is then able to plug back in and act upon the material.
But it's very possible I'm using the wrong words or have a limited understanding of the concept.
That's where I stand but it's hard to even talk about that when most discussions on the topic wind up being hog wrestling in the reductionistic mud of "love is just chemicals" :reddit-logo: takes. :sadness:
Disclaimer: Love is technically chemicals if we must go there but the implication that it somehow makes love not real or invalid is pure :reddit-logo: :brainworms:
Love is just chemicals the same way a child is just carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous and hydrogen. The "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting and it's pointlessly reductive.
I've sometimes used a puppy as a metaphor: "yes a puppy is a bunch of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous, and hydrogen, and is worth less than a dollar of those chemicals in their most elemental forms. Or it's a puppy."
It gets the point across to all but the most :reddit-logo: brained smuglords who will continue to focus on the former as a sort of emotional stake in being as supposedly unemotional as possible, anyway. :very-intelligent:
requesting matching :donald: and :mickey: emotes for the meme
Yeah that's what I'm drawing a distinction between, people give the word "just" a lot of reductive power. Love might be made of chemicals, but those chemicals gain new characteristics when organized in specific ways, to the degree that a new referent/entity comes into existence. Love or consciousness are neither "just" concepts nor "just" the building blocks that comprise them, nor are they essences that exist in some realm alien from the material world they arise from.
yeah that's where I'm at, I don't think consciousness has a good explanation yet, but the very direct dualist explanation of it somehow being something non-physical that's riding along with a body just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Non-physical things have never been observed, so how would it fit into any explanation of anything?
This is kind of an interesting statement, because if something is directly observable, is it not, by definition, a physical thing?
There's a bit of ambiguity in some cases between what is and isn't physically existant. Do nation-states physically exist? In a sense, yes, we can say the United States exists, we can go there and point to the land and say, "See, it's right there!" But in another sense, it's made up, it's a social construct, if everyone in the world decided that that land area was not the United States and there's no such country, then I think we'd all agree that it doesn't exist any more. So if the United States is a social and mental construct, then does that mean it doesn't physically exist? But we can observe physical effects on people living in the US, we can see how life expectancy fell when the government botched the COVID response, surely that's evidence that the US is real, right? The model of the US existing is a useful tool for being able to predict physical events.
Is this the same or different from, say, a chair? Well, a chair is a collection of atoms (mostly empty space), but what determines which atoms we designate as being part of the chair? It's based on what's useful, isn't it? If a leg breaks off of the chair, we might still say that it's part of the chair, perhaps because it could be reattached, but if the leg was ground up into sawdust, we'd probably instead say that it used to be part of a chair. We can see then that a chair is really just a grouping of atoms that forms a useful mental construct for humans. If there were no humans, the atoms would still exist in the same arrangement, but would it still be a chair? I think that depends on what thing is observing it and whether it finds it useful to group those atoms in the same way. Chairs are a social construct, don't @ me.
So rather than interpreting dualism as some sort of semi-physical ghost riding around with a body, isn't it possible to interpret it as consciousness being a useful enough construct that it can be said to exist as a separate thing? And while yes, we can observe how changes in the physical world (like hunger) lead to changes in consciousness, we can also see how changes in the mental world can influence the physical (changes in blood pressure based on what you're thinking about for example).
Futhermore, we can argue that consciousness emerges from the physical world, but we could also argue that the physical world emerges from consciousness. Our understanding of the physical world is fundamentally rooted in our senses, and if we were cut off from our senses, then we would have no means of understanding or interacting with it. It could be said that the world we interact with is really more of a world of concepts, and our bodies can be observed to alter what we sense to make more sense to use before we actually experience it, the difference between sensation and perception. And so what even is the physical world? The world of atoms? But aren't atoms just models that help us to navigate and understand the world that we actually interact with? Earlier, I said that when we refer to a chair, we are grouping together a certain arrangement of atoms, creating a concept out of the physical. But in reality, don't we start with the chair, and then study it's properties to learn more about the concept that we already created? I don't know that there's an objective answer to that, of which is more "real" and what "emerges" from what - it seems like it's a matter of perspective.
I don't necessarily agree with dualism and idk if my line of thinking is compatible with it or not but I'm not sure that a strict physicalist approach is objectively compelling.
Well if you can entertain the idea that non-physical things might exist then you're observing a non-physical thing at every point of your existence, your own consciousness. What better candidate for the non-physical than consciousness itself?
My friends, are you acquainted w numbers?
"Emergentism" is just a rephrasing of mechanistic materialism, you still claim consciousness exists wholly due to the machinations of the base material reality. Whether you say that consciousness emerges from or literally is base material reality is irrelevant, you're saying the same thing.
Also "novelty" doesn't exist in the material world, it exists only in your mind, the thing judging what mechanism is novel or greater than the other is your and other people's minds so "emergentism" is strictly speaking a property of consciousness, not material reality, you just attribute it to material reality because you're still fundamentally a vulgar materialist.
How do you personally separate and define things? In my reading and talking with people, there's a useful distinction between vulgar/mechanistic materialism (which in this context I'm using to signify the "love is just chemicals, free will doesn't exist since we're just reactions" concept) and an emergence model of consciousness that sees it as growing from simple material but gaining new properties that the fundamental building blocks didn't have. One of which is being able to plug back into and influence the material dialectically, or what one might call "free will" or agency.
It's the idea that consciousness exists as a complex object that can act upon the material, but isn't separate or alien from the material that it arises from.
It isn't though, your idea fundamentally does not differ from vulgar materialism if you don't give consciousness by itself any agency. You mention "gaining new properties that the fundamental building blocks do not have" but this doesn't really make sense to me, all the properties gained by the new system are in your mind, the qualitative leap from "nothing has emerged" to "something new emerged" happens within your mind, not in physical reality, in physical reality it's just the same old atoms. So for that reason to me saying "consciousness is emergent" isn't really all that different from for example Daniel Dennet's reductive physicalism where he claims consciousness is illusory, you're still left with this gaping huge explanatory gap between our quantitative models of the physical world and the qualitative worlds of our minds.
But it doesn't, you're still claiming material reality is the only causal agent in whole of existence, saying that certain material systems cause emergence of consciousness is just a semantical trick where you gave certain kinds of physical processes a new name, you're saying the same thing as the vulgar materialists.
To further drive my point: How would you as an emergentist approach researching consciousness differently than a classical vulgar materialist? You'd still probably be gathering a bunch of neural correlates and then try to concoct a mathematical model of the whole thing, no? That's what people like Daniel Dennett are doing to.
Why does consciousness have to come from somewhere else or be removed from the material in order to possess agency or exert influence over the material?
I'm drawing a distinction between what I think are two different concepts (I'll use "vulgar" and "dialectical" as signifiers for them but I understand you may have different understandings of both words). I may not be communicating it very well, but you're going to have to explain away the differences if you want to convince me that they're both the same concept.
edit: I wrote this before your edits. fwiw I'm not approaching this as a researcher of consciousness but as a regular person, so I can't speak for how effectively this model suits that line of work. it's been a good fit for my understanding of myself and the world, but I'm willing to expand or change it if there's good reasons to.
Because the alternative makes no sense. What exactly is the difference between saying consciousness emerges wholly from the workings of the material world and saying consciousness literally just is the material world? The logical endpoint of both ideas lead you to the same place: consciousness supervenes on the material world.
You didn't solve the causality problem by arbitrarily declaring certain physical processes are actually a whole new thing that now somehow has a life of its own.
Well that's the explanatory power of emergence in my mind, that something can qualitatively change when its more basic parts reach a critical mass of complexity. Consciousness seems to possess an essence or nature that defies explanation or examination, and in my reading and talking with people they seem to either reduce it to nothing more than its parts (consciousness doesn't exist except conceptually, everything is simply material) or ascribe some form of alienating dualism to it (consciousness exists external to the body).
And the synthesis that works for me is that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon. It's an attempt at a sort of dialectical dualism, where the consciousness exists (more than just a conceptualization or construct of material mechanisms but actually exists in reality) and can exert influence on other things that actually exist, while also springing from and being influenced by material mechanisms. Causality is complex and dialectical, not linearly one dimensional.
But, again, it doesn't. You say it does because you arbitrarily claimed certain physical processes to have a life of their own even though they still act according to the same set of relatively simple rules governing all of material reality, all of the complexity of those systems still fundamentally is due to the workings of those relatively simple rules. You did not resolve the dialectic, you just obfuscated it a bit more.
Are a monkey and a human equally capable of influencing their material world? Are both equally capable of examining and reflecting on their own consciousness and altering or refocusing the processes that make up their own consciousness?
No, but not sure where you're going with that, my point still stands. You still claim both the monkey and the human are wholly subservient to physical laws. Just because both do something more interesting than just colliding with other matter in a predictable, and one of them does even more interesting stuff, doesn't automatically mean their consciousness has agency under emergentism, you attributing agency to either is arbitrary because when it comes down to it you still believe physical laws rule everything.
The only way to properly go about this dialectic is acknowledge the specific character of consciousness and that it exists separately from but is heavily intertwined with the material world.
Well then we have to define agency to figure out exactly what we're talking about. There's a continuum of difference between a rock, a mosquito, a monkey, and a human and their ability to alter material reality (including themselves). I might say agency and consciousness are both good ways of conceptualizing that difference. What is agency to you?
To me it's causal efficacy at the base ontological level. Under emergentism consciousness does not have agency on an ontological level but rather on an abstract one, at which point the definition is arbitrary and not very useful most of the time.
If you say matter is the only substance with causal efficacy at the ontological level then anything else you say about consciousness is just a rephrasing of the same idea.
What does it mean, in the real world, to have agency on an ontological level? If we're drawing a distinction between an ontological versus abstract conceptualization of agency, how does that change our understanding of the world?
I think this statement is just a reduction, not an argument. I'm taking a concept (materialism) and unwrapping/restructuring it in a way that has better explanatory power, in my opinion, than any alternatives. And I'm not going so far as to say matter is the only substance with causal efficacy, in fact it'd be very difficult to pinpoint the "matter" of something like consciousness or society or whatever.
Society is something that exists, yet is made only of individuals. But when those people are organized in specific ways they produce society, a new essence or force, an entity that itself can dominate the people that comprise it. We might draw a distinction between the society and the individual to help understand the tensions at play, but we'd never go as far as to say that society is some alien being that exists removed from the individuals that make it up.
In your day to day life, nothing, we're doing a philosophy here, a discipline famous for often not being applicable to real life.
Pretty hugely I'd say. Picking one metaphysic over another absolutely would massively influence actual real world research. If most cognitive scientists were say, idealists instead of physicalists they would almost certainly approach researching consciousness in a drastically different way. You'd see a lot more theories like this for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction
And I think it doesn't. You're no closer to explaining the tiniest bit of consciousness than Daniel Dennett or anybody for that matter.
Sure, but now you're talking about the abstractions again. The hard problem of consciousness is fundamentally about metaphysics whether you like it or not. I fully understand that for most real life stuff it doesn't really matter whether our consciousness is fundamental or dependent on material reality or emergent from material reality or whatever, but I think if we want to get to the bottom of what it is we need to really think hard about metaphysics. The current mood in academia seems to be "well the standard model and general relativity work really well so let's just try to explain everything in terms of that" and I think that's just completely inadequate for the problem at hand.
fwiw my first two questions weren't meant to be gotchas or whatever, I'm trying to better understand what you're saying. I get what ontological versus abstract might mean in abstract, but I'm having a hard time understanding the critique in a way that I can either argue against or use to adjust my model. And I haven't read Danial Dennett so grouping my thoughts with his doesn't do anything for me by way of critique.
Looking back on human evolution, we could look at specific points and say no, we didn't have consciousness yet, or yes, we have consciousness here. But there's no exact moment we can pinpoint and say "this is when we were bestowed with consciousness". But we know two things: 1, that there's a qualitative difference in how the less-conscious entities interact with themselves and the world compared to the more-conscious entities and 2, the more-conscious entities gradually evolved from the less-conscious entities. So over time this new substance, consciousness, came into existence, and as it expresses itself more strongly we have more reason to define it as its own entity. But at no point is it ever separate from its makeup.
tbh I'm at the tail end of a double at work so I may have to sleep then read up on some of the things you referenced before I respond again. appreciate the conversation