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
mind-body duelists? what are they gonna do, send me to the shadow realm?
I have an open offer to all mind-body dualists: I will give you all my mind & soul particles if you give me all your physical currency.
mind-body duelists
...oh my god
furiously taking notes for my tabletop game
dan dennett is not a dualist, but a physicalist
dan dennett is the most annoying person on the planet
it's not likely that the most annoying person on the planet has a correct theory of mind
physicalism is likely not true
qed
“If it turns out that our species is wiped out by atomic weapons, that makes the field of nuclear physics false” -Dan Dennett, basically
Cartesianism and its consequences have been a disaster for philosophy
Full agree, but I'll raise you one more that it's Platonism that really started the trash fire.
Desecrates does have a special evil though :france-cool:
"Descartes" is disposal in Portuguese, so a pile of trash can be called pilha de descartes. Descartes is therefore trash, QED.
A lot of dualist arguments are tedious BS thrown up to try to debatebro save Christian conceptions of the soul. That said the just-so Physicalist model is smug and shallow. We're a collective system of conscious language-using subjects creating a model that we map onto our experiences. Reality fundamentally consists of both the observer(s) and the material reality, you literally can't have one without the other. The Physicalist construction of a material world without consciousness, or consciousness as an illusion is every bit as flimsy as ideas of philosophical zombies, maybe worse. The reason dualists end up creating such ridiculous thought experiments is because they're trying to smuggle in free will or some kind of metaphysical soul concept, and so they latch onto what is one of these inescapable gotchas of philosophy. The model is not reality, but it is all we have access to, and so we're stuck as unhappy Platonists. The best we can do is complain it's all a non-sequitur and a waste of time. It reminds me of reading Plotinus drone on about "the One" and how it was all a clever, inexhaustible trick of reason that just worked. There's no true philosophy, it's just a matter of where you do your hand-waiving to hide the fact that we're fundamentally limited in our ability to construct a coherent, self-consistent model of the world. It's like Quantum Physics, people would rather fantasize about implications that can allow them to believe in free will and souls than accept the fact that there's a hard wall preventing us from understanding reality at a certain level.
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.
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.
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.
this is the mechanistic materialist position phrased slightly differently.
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.
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.
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?
Non-physical things have never been observed
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.
Non-physical things have never been observed, so how would it fit into any explanation of anything?
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?
"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’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.
One of which is being able to plug back into and influence the material dialectically, or what one might call “free will” or agency.
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.
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?
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.
and can exert influence on other things that actually exist
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?
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?
a rephrasing of the same idea
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.
What does it mean, in the real world, to have agency on an ontological level?
In your day to day life, nothing, we're doing a philosophy here, a discipline famous for often not being applicable to real life.
If we’re drawing a distinction between an ontological versus abstract conceptualization of agency, how does that change our understanding of the world?
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
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 think it doesn't. You're no closer to explaining the tiniest bit of consciousness than Daniel Dennett or anybody for that matter.
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.
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
If you're talking about Rene "uh ackually, the immaterial soul steers the material body through the pituitary gland despite being immaterial" Descartes dualism, yeah it's pretty much garbage. They can never explain how something immaterial can not only interact but dominate something material. The idea of the immaterial dominating the material has insidious implications. This is why settlers constantly paint Indigenous people and Asians to a lesser extend as noble savages "close to nature." Being close to nature is to say they're more bestial and lower in the great chain of being compared with the cerebral European whose closer proximity to God means they are more distant from nature. Their alleged distance from God means the God given rights of life, liberty, and most importantly, property did not apply to them, giving settlers ideological carte blanche to steal land from the Indigenous and genocide Indigenous peoples in the same way you get rid of termites eating your house.
A copy of you would be like a biological sibling. Same genes but not you because of slightly or largely different experiences
The way dualists explain it is what if there was a magical copy of you that also can't think. It would go about its existence behaving like you through contrivance, but since it can't think, it's actually just a biological coincidence of random molecules appearing to be you and acting like you.
This is supposed to disprove the materialist conception of consciousness, because the claim is that if materialism were true, there would be no distinction between you and a coincidental copy that's exactly like you except for your mental states
I feel like a thought experiment that begins from the premise that physical systems don't actually work or do anything so through random chance a pile of dead wood with no actual biomechanical systems could produce an ongoing perfect mimicry of a person is basically just saying "oh yeah, but what if there was literal magic and physics didn't actually do anything, what about that huh? What if we're just squishy meat ghosts instead, and logs can walk and talk if imagine at them hard enough?"
One can arrive at any conclusion one desires by just presupposing a world where a hand picked set of rules are true (that's what neoclassical economists do, for example) but that doesn't make those imagined rules true or in any way support their conclusion. Like yes, if magic were real and you could separate out the core of someone's being and allow it to exist and operate independent of their flesh, then you would be existing in a world where you could do that, but seeing as you cannot the only reasonable conclusion is that the condition of "literal magic" is not present.
You're saying it perfectly. I don't know why I'm offering even a little respect to these premises they came up with. I was told they were the best things dualists have, and they are just magical fantasy scenarios. And yet philosophers like David Chalmers and John Searle are considered geniuses in their field. How do these people have careers if their entire philosophy boils down to belief in literal otherworldly magic?
That's just circular logic though, no?
If it was possible for some thing to behave exactly as you do but without thinking then mind-body dualism would have to be true, because something exists with a human body but no mind. If mind-body dualism is bunk, that thing could not exist, it could not appear to think without thinking.
Mind-body dualism seems like a pretty classic case of motivated reasoning in general, "I want to believe that my mind is not an artifact of my physical body, so I will look for reasons that this might be true".
Yeah it's entirely circular, which is why I don't understand how dualists use it. Their most famous argument is the one about the zombies. It's just "imagine a person without the unexplainable non-physical mind I say they have" and then claiming this is proof a non-physical mind exists, because it's a claim that people with minds and those without minds would be different
It reminds me of Pascal's wager, an argument that is obviously heavily flawed unless you already accept, uncritically, the assertion being argued. That's why I believe motivated reasoning is at work here, these arguments won't convince the critical, but they do allow believers to convince themselves that their otherwise baseless beliefs are actually well reasoned.
This isn't to say I think dualism is wrong, but more to say that it is non-falsifiable and not well supported by existing evidence.
The point why I can understand the want for it is that I have an experience of experiencing/thinking/being/feeling whatever (don't google qualia). This feels separate from the physical world that I do see or feel or hear or imagine. That is all.
However I do think that there is a material reality that is responsible for everything. In that regard I follow
Chalmers argues for an "explanatory gap" from the objective to the subjective
But for his other things, not.
I mean the only relevant critique is the Hard Problem of Consciousness , which doesn't really contradict materialism as such, just its crudest forms (i.e. feelings of love are just chemicals in the brain durrr hurrrr)
From the SEP
The How question thus subdivides into a diverse family of more specific questions depending upon the specific sort or feature of consciousness one aims to explain, the specific restrictions one places on the range of the explanans and the criterion one uses to define explanatory success. Some of the resulting variants seem easier to answer than others. Progress may seem likely on some of the so called “easy problems” of consciousness, such as explaining the dynamics of access consciousness in terms of the functional or computational organization of the brain (Baars 1988). Others may seem less tractable, especially the so-called “hard problem” (Chalmers 1995) which is more or less that of giving an intelligible account that lets us see in an intuitively satisfying way how phenomenal or “what it's like” consciousness might arise from physical or neural processes in the brain.
This seems more sensible if I'm reading it right. It's saying that "hard science" types of things about consciousness are simple to explain because they have a source, like neurons and parts of the brain. But more difficult would be the more ephemeral parts of what consciousness is like from the point of view of a conscious person? Or am I confused
That's exactly how I understand it. We can get the "scientific" explanation of how visual stimuli arrive at the brain. But the question of how visual stimuli are perceived and felt - what it means to see a flower in a phenomenal sense rather than a scientific sense - is far harder to "prove" or ground in a material conception of consciousness. Basically, how does my feeling of hunger come about from the stimuli that are causing hunger (which are material and scientific)
this line of questions actually tickles my interest and I'm gonna look into it more
:stalin-feels-good:
I'll admit my reading might be wrong btw. The way I see it tho is that it's really the question of how the scientific neural stimuli we understand as key to our experience of the world become "consciousness" as we understand it - and there's no clear answer to it.
Granted I'm very influenced by people like Andy Clark and the idea of "extended mind" (i.e. our minds aren't merely the meat in our brains), so I'm a bit ideosyncratic
If I put the same code on a micro controller it will run the same as the other. If I activate a muscle neuron in a lab it will behave the same as an equal muscle neuron will. An exact copy is impossible to create, but if it were possible it would be the same, but it would not mean it would have to behave the same. Since we don't quite enough if quantum effects in which the results are random can have chaotic effects leading to different outcomes. It would still be the same, but would not clear up anything about a soul, which existence is arbitrary in any case.
Of course the individual experiences of the "original" and "identical physical impossible copy" are different. Since they have no connection between them. It doesn't clear up anything at all.
the point of those thought experiments is to illustrate that the experiential components of a living beings existence (known to philosophy nerds as Qualia) are not necessary to explain the biological/physical phenomenon of life. a computer can process information too but it doesnt experience it as far as we can tell. even phenomenon like the weather can be considered an information processing system but we don't typically attribute consciousness or internal experience to it. hypothetically you could therefore have had humans or other life that behave in all the same ways and do the same information processing tasks but without an internal experience of their existence, and the fact that we dont have that but we have us instead may mean consciousness is more than just information processing or illusion. its not strictly an argument for dualism, but as part of the discourse against a physicalist materialist conception of consciousness as illusion, or information processing. personally i think consciousness is somehow fundamental to existence in ways we dont understand, like space, time, or matter, and even phenomena from subatomic particles to stars might have an incomprehensible-to-humans internal experience of some kind.
Personally I don't think it makes any sense.
But what I think is just a hallucination caused by the matter and the energy imparted upon that matter when everything came into existence, which we're just seeing unfold in exactly the way that it always would have :edgeworth-shrug:
I'm a compatabilist! I think determinism and free will are perfectly compatible and, in fact, we only have free will because of determinism in the first place.
which we’re just seeing unfold in exactly the way that it always would have
For now, I subscribe to the notion that the uncertainty in physical theories of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics is not a mere consequence of our mathematical models but a feature of the underlying reality. Maybe someone will find a better theory that unmasks what I think modern physics considers to be intrinsically random process in QM as epistemic (i.e., our model is flawed). That kind of development would be world-changing and might really upset Penrose lol.
but somehow isn’t alive on some metaphysical level
but it’s not actually me because it doesn’t have my soul.
Using absurd metaphysics that you're setting the premises for beforehand to explain itself :marx-angry:
All the gals know that consciousness is a metaphysical particle that constitutes organizations of consciousness throughout material reality with human consciousness being one particularly "advanced" constitution of it.
Lol, yeah it basically doesn't make any sense. I don't think you are missing much.
The theory sucks like you can really tell someone came up with it in the 1600s
I mean, sure, your reactions to stuff does come from the brain technically, but your brain isn't fully rational and is susceptible to instincts and affects. It's not just a vessel for rational thought.
