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The relationship between science and materialism

chriswl said:
I can't. It's logical nonsense.

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Then you didn't read the article properly. The defence you offered of physicalism (supervenience) is logically compatible with my position. This in turn makes that position invalid as a defence of physicalism, because my position is not physicalism.

PLEASE read the entry. :(
 
I don't have the vaguest notion what paragraph (4) means.

Geoff said:
This is saying exactly what I am saying. If you try to employ the model you want employ you are left with the situation where one thing and one thing only appears to missing. That thing is Being.
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Which we get by redefining math so that Being replaces zero. And this makes the even more hotly disputed Being-math come to life as the world we experience.

Not the vaguest notion.

~~ Paul
 
Ichneumonwasp said:
In other words, being an a-hole is far more important to you than communicating ideas. OK, if that is how you want to live your life, be my guest.
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No offence intended, Wasp. Apologies if any was felt. I think it's time to give this a break. I don't know about you, but my brain hurts. :(
 
chriswl said:
Brain processes are "necessary" conditions for minds. We don't even need to bother with the second half of your sentence, you've said it right there. Check out post #469 if you think I'm misrepresenting this.
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No, you continue to miss the point, although we agree human brain processes are necessary for minds we would accept as human. Sufficiency is another problem; assumption of is not proof of, but is the return to circular reasoning.
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
I don't have the vaguest notion what paragraph (4) means.

Not the vaguest notion.

~~ Paul
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In that case I need to explain it carefully, both for yourself and for Chris

4. The necessary beings problem

(Cf. Jackson 1998) Imagine a necessary being -- that is, a being which exists in all possible worlds -- which is essentially nonphysical. If such a non-physical being exists, it is natural to suppose that physicalism is false. But if physicalism is defined according to (2), the existence of such a being is compatible with physicalism. For consider: if the actual world is wholly physical, apart from the necessary non-physical being, any minimal physical duplicate of the actual world is a duplicate simpliciter. Since the non-physical being exists in all possible worlds, it exists at all worlds which are minimal physical duplicates of the actual world. So we seem to face a problem: the existence of the non-physical necessary being entails that physicalism is false, but the definition of physicalism permits it to be true in this case.
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Chris had tried to defend a supervenience form of physicalism - that is a non-eliminative form of materialism where mind "supervenes" on matter. "Supervene" effectively means that whilst mind cannot be said to BE matter, it can at least be said that any change in the matter will result in a change in the mind.

The reason this does not work as a defence of physicalism is because of another very famous philosophical argument - the form of the cosmological argument which tries to prove the existence of a neccessary Being. At this point I need to point out something about this form of the cosmological argument. Whilst it is used by theists as an attempt to prove the existence of God, it doesn't really do this even if the argument goes through. What it proves is the existence of neccesary Being, which isn't the same thing. So I don't want you to think that accepting this version of the cosmological arguments leads to the Christian God existing. The problem here is that the Christian who use it tend to think it proves more than it actually does. They think that once you have proved that Being is neccesary that everybody will naturally assume that the neccesary Being is their God. Unfortunately, many atheists make exactly the same mistake as the Christians at this point.

What has this to do with supervenience?

If a physicalist tries to use supervenience as a concept to explain what minds are then he has left one thing unexplained. He has left out the meaningless "is" that others have been tempted to place in the sentence "minds are brain processes". Precisely because he has NOT used this "is" he has left the door wide open for the cosmological argument - which effectively turns the missing "is" into "neccesary being" in exactly the same way I do. Chris object to this on the grounds that he couldn't imagine a neccesary being. This is understandable, but that isn't enough to defeat the logic of the cosmological argument. It goes through anyway (logically), because of the specific nature of supervenience theories - because they leave that "is" undefined. This has not proved the existence of God. But it HAS proved that the supervenience defence of physicalism is compatible with a position which isn't physicalism. In other words, supervenience theories end up not being physicalism at all. They end up being something else.
 
Wasp,

OK, I'll try again.

Geoff posted: a subject is a being which has subjective experiences

Wasp replies:

Is a subject just a viewpoint or is it a being that has subjective experiences?
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It can be considered to be both of those things.

Those two concepts don't mean the same thing to me. It doesn't seem to me that a viewpoint could be aware or do anything.
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A physical viewpoint couldn't, because that is just a location in space. But the internal, subjective viewpoint does that because....because that's what it is! Whether or not it can "do anything" other than be a passive viewpoint is another issue. Some people would claim it was where free will comes from.

So I ask again, is subject awareness from a particular view point (when we are discussing the macro environment of "beings" like us)?
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Ah, now I get the question. No, I am not talking about a physical view point. For the purposes of this discussion we aren't talking about the physical world in terms of location we can put our body. We are talking about it in terms of our phenomenological window on reality. This just happens to co-incide with the physical location of our heads.

Geoff
 
But for beings like us the viewpoint is simply personal "space" is it not? It is not available to anyone else because of this personal, first-person "property". I ask because the viewpoint doesn't appear to me to be the critical issue at all. From a naturalist perspective we could speak of neuron firings that one could see from the outside, but there is also the view from the inside -- what those neurons acting together actually do which you can have no idea of at this point from the outside. You don't have to put a subject in there for the perspective difference. You can say that one is an experience and the other is a "happening" if you like. The critical issue, it seems to me, is awarness. Would that be correct?
 
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Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
So there is no referrent for subject experience in physicalism?

~~ Paul
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That is correct. When a physicalist says "subjective experience" it doesn't refer to anything which hasn't already got a perfectly good physical name. Therefore it is excess to requirements. There is nothing for it to refer to. That is why the only version of physicalism which is logically coherent is eliminitavism. The other versions try to introduce some or other term for mental things, of which "subjective experience" is an example. But when they try to define what these mental terms are supposed to refer to they are stuck between a rock and a hard place. They need to satisfy two requirements:

1) Mind has to refer to something which isn't already described physically -otherwise it's a redundant term from the moment it is defined.
2) But it can't refer to anything non-physical.

Satisfying these requirement is, rather obviously, a logical impossibility. That is why eliminativism is logically inevitable if you want to be a materialist.

Geoff
 
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JustGeoff said:
Chris had tried to defend a supervenience form of physicalism - that is a non-eliminative form of materialism where mind "supervenes" on matter. "Supervene" effectively means that whilst mind cannot be said to BE matter, it can at least be said that any change in the matter will result in a change in the mind.
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Actually that's wrong way round. Any change in the supervenient property (mind) must imply a change in that which it supervenes on (matter). But not necessarily vice-versa. Consciousness has the property of "multiple-realisability". This is why the mind in supervenience physicalism avoids being an epiphenomenal thing that is beyond our investigation. If there were many possible mind states for a given brain state then mind would contain inaccessible information that was beyond the physical world. But this is not what the theory says. It claims that if mind states are different then this must be reflected in differences in the physical brain state.

As for the rest of the argument - I still have no idea what a necessary being could be (apart from God) or what a cosmological argument that wasn't an argument for God could be.
 
So can I use subjective experience until such time as neuroscience has discovered and named all of the brain components that the word will duplicate in the future?

And once everything is discovered, can scientists overload the definition of subjective experience to mean those things, as scientists do with so many words? Or is that disallowed, too?

I never realized that philosophy disallows synonyms and collective terms. I learn something new every day.

~~ Paul
 
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Ichneumonwasp said:
But for beings like us the viewpoint is simply personal "space" is it not? It is not available to anyone else because of this personal, first-person "property". I ask because the viewpoint doesn't appear to me to be the critical issue at all.
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When you are dreaming, is there a view point?
When you close your eyes and squish your eyeballs till everything goes multicoloured, is there a view point?

The critical issue, it seems to me, is awarness. Would that be correct?
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Yes. I suppose I see what you mean. The subject is always aware of something. Without anything for it to be aware of, there would be no subject. Awareness is therefore critical. But this has to mean "awareness" in the subjective sense of the word. You could describe an automatic speeding camera as being "aware" but that wouldn't be the correct sort of awareness.
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
So can I use subjective experience until such time as neuroscience has discovered and named all of the brain components that the word will duplicate in the future?
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That's very close to something Uber-eliminativist "neurophilosopher" Patricia Churchland might say. That's the goal of eliminativism - to replace all terms such as "subjective experience" with neuroscientific terms.

And once everything is discovered, can scientists overload the definition of subjective experience to mean those things, as scientists do with so many words? Or is that disallowed, too?
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In a debate like this that would also be disallowed.

I never realized that philosophy disallows synonyms and collective terms. I learn something new every day.
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You are allowed them, but you must make sure that the synonyms are really synonyms. You can't define X to be synonymous with Y unless they are indistinguishable in every respect. This is not true of brain processes and subjective experiences, therefore they can't be synonyms.

Collective terms are fine. If you think collective terms are going to help solve the logical problem then please say why and I'll explain why it makes no difference.
 
OK, I just want to nail down this perspective issue so that we are sure that we are on the same page. A computer, for instance carries out steps in a program. I can look from the outside and see what it does. From the inside, there is computation, which I really can't see from the outside. That is a "first-person" type perspective for the computer (and I use the words "first-person" extraordinarily loosely). There is no person in there, there is no awareness, no insight or understanding so there is no subject. But there is a different perspective -- one from the outside and one from the inside. In the case of the computer, the "inside perspective" doesn't really mean much though. In the absence of awareness you can't do anything with computation except spit out some calculated numbers on a sheet of paper or a cathode ray tube. It happens, but that is all. That is basically why I say that I can't see the viewpoint as being all that critical an issue. It is the awareness that matters.

Can we agree on that much?
 
Geoff said:
You are allowed them, but you must make sure that the synonyms are really synonyms. You can't define X to be synonymous with Y unless they are indistinguishable in every respect. This is not true of brain processes and subjective experiences, therefore they can't be synonyms.
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Here is your chance to explain to me why subjective experience can't be synonymous with a set of brain processes. Please include a clear definition of subjective experience in the explanation.

~~ Paul
 
chriswl said:
Actually that's wrong way round. Any change in the supervenient property (mind) must imply a change in that which it supervenes on (matter). But not necessarily vice-versa.
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Doesn't make any difference to the argument. :)

As for the rest of the argument - I still have no idea what a necessary being could be (apart from God) or what a cosmological argument that wasn't an argument for God could be.
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You are basically saying "Either God exists or He doesn't", where "God" is something like the Christian God. What if something exists which has some of the properties of the Christian God but lack many of the others including those that are of critical importance to Christians like, say, "infinitely good"? Does God then exist? At this point you say yes and the Christian says no. You're both wrong. What's happened is that you've only got one concept of God to consider, when there are in fact countless different concepts of God.

Most discussions about the existence of God are completely and utterly pointless. Not for the reasons you think they are pointless (because "God is a ridiculous concept") but because the people having the argument have probably got completely different conceptions of God to begin with. So they are arguing about "the existence of God" but each one doesn't even know what the other means by the word "God". So what's the debate going to achieve? Nothing. Instead of asking "Does God exist?" people should ask "What sort of God could exist?" Then they might get somewhere.

Geoff
 
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