Wherein SentientMeat tries to convince other-wise that physicalism is reasonable

Great Debates
1

This thread is really for one poster, friend other-wise, who is currently making a “last ditch effort to embrace physicalism” but still finding it “as unreasonable as the alternatives” (solipsism, panpsychism, pantheism etc.). Now, even one who disagrees with me as fundamentally as Liberal still explicitly recognises that physicalism is valid (.ie that it contains no glaring logical inconsistencies, even if he doesn’t accept its soundness – the truth of premises I set forth).

Anyone else can join in, but I probably won’t have time to field your questions here - perhaps the threads at the end will help.
So this thread is dedicated to those issues in the physicalist worldview which, through past experience, other-wise seems not to accept as “reasonable” because he thinks there are logical inconsistencies lurking therein. What I’m seeking here is to bring other-wise into agreement with Lib that physicalism is at least a reasonable, consistent position. Like Lib, he might well simply refuse to accept some premise or other, but that’s by the by.

Anyway, here what I’d suggest are the central premises of physicalism:
[ul]
[li] There are physical things, such as molecules, rocks, cells and computers. [*]Processes such as chemical reactions, geological change, biological respiration or digital computation can be explained by reference to these things, and can thus be called physical processes.[/li][li]If something (an explicandum) can be explained by physical processes, no alternative explanation (explicans) is necessary. (This effectively applies Ockham’s Razor to said explanatory entities.)[/ul]And so, the physicalist goal is to propose explanations solely by reference to these molecules, rocks, cells computers or whatever (to which I’d add energy, forces and spacetime, incidentally – this is what distinguishes physicalism from rather old-fashioned materialism, since there’s clearly more to the universe than just matter). Of course, I’d love to discuss the plausibility of some of those explanations, but we very rarely seem to get that far at all, for reasons I’ll list in a moment. [/li]

I’ll also add here a couple of points which reflect my own take on physicalism (which I don’t think impugn it in any way):
[ul][li]If we are wholly physical “thinking machines” which evolved somewhere in the 13.7 billion years of spacetime, there would be a limit to how “certain” an individual machine could be about anything (or, indeed, everything), and to how convincing any statement or output from one machine could be to another, because machines can always get things wrong (or so it seemingly[sup]N[/sup] seems to this one!). [/li][li]Again, if wholly physical “thinking machines” evolved, their language would make the construction of paradoxes such as “This statement is false” inevitable.[/ul]Thus, anyone looking for some kind of “perfect philosophy” which was utterly immune to any critiques or questioning would thus be seeking a mythical philosopher’s stone. Ultimately, there would only be talking apes throwing words at each other, and any argument could de facto be countered with a rude noise. If these are fundamental flaws in my worldview, that’s OK, since I think it applies in equal measure to all of the alternatives. (And I’m in good company in this respect, especially on points 15-19 & 35-37. The first physicalist premise above is not testable – it can ultimately only be accepted or not, and I have little to say to the solipsist or anyone else who simply doesn’t accept that there are physical objects.)[/li]
So, to the progress of other-wise in past exchanges. Here, he finally agrees that life is physical. Here, he finally agrees that the computations in the silicon device under his desk are physical.
Now, the physicalist position is that “awareness/experience/consciousness/Point-Of-View/qualia/thought”, or whatever “mental” entity one might point to, ultimately arise from processes in a living computer: the human brain and nervous system. And so, it would seem not too great a further step from there to suggest that there is nothing logically inconsistent about the position that living computations are physical. (Yes, I know this is an unbearable clumsy oversimplification but please bear with me– I’m trying to get to where we really disagree, logically speaking, as quickly as possible.)

But in that same thread, we return to the same old roundabout, to do with the evolution of language itself. A useful language must be able to label not only objects (like the “tree”), but processes (like the “sound” of the tree) even when those objects and processes aren’t being sensed right now (like the sound of the tree “when there’s nobody around”). Language is thus used to label memories (of objects or processes), or ‘averages’ of memories (ie. “concepts”), or configurations of memories (eg . spatial.: the cat sat on the mat, Australia is south of me, or temporal: the Ancient Greeks lived before me, next Tuesday comes after today). other-wise seems to have trouble accepting the physicalist description of language (which I would count amongst its least controversial aspects), despite using words like “Australia” and “Ancient Greek” himself. For some reason, he cannot bring himself to describe either language users or anything he can’t directly experience himself (such as the life and computers around before his birth) as “physical”, and I’d like to explore why.

He also seems to have problems with the rather arbitrary and inaccurate nature of how language and communication works (which I suspect has something to do with my ‘couple of points’ above). Finally, in our last exchange he made some remarks about “scientific evidence” and the apparently monopolistic influence it has on physicalism (which I’d agree with to some extent – I’d suggest that the significance or utility of “evidence” is measured by its repeatability or verifiability, for example, ie. evidence lacking in “scientific-ness” is arguably not “evidence” as such – the plural of ‘anecdote’ is not necessarily ‘data’. Again, this might be just another semantic quibble where we don’t really disagree so much, but I’d like to make sure).

So there it is – if I’ve misrepresented anything, I invite correction. Otherwise, other-wise, I’ll keep putting words on your screen until my outputs are exhausted of permutations. :slight_smile:

Some useful previous posts/threads for interested observers:
I’m a physicalist, not a reductionist.
Nor an eliminativist either, really.
A memory is a physical thing. (with relevant conclusion)
Find your position: 12 easy questions.

2

I would love to join the debate but … you have me convinced.

3

What the hell.

Actually it would be more accurate to say there are processes, all of which are interactions or relationships between other processes, and all processes can be viewed as a noun, but they all actually consist of activity. The physical things can best be explained by reference to these processes. The world is fundamentally interactionist, not fundamentally physical.

It may seem more intuitive to you to say “interactions between what things, huh?” than to ask “things consisting of what interactions, pray tell?”; and I will not deny that we find it compellingly useful to work with rocks and computers as things rather than as motion and interplay. And yet motion and interplay it is. And so it is, all the way down.

See above, then add: To “explain” something is to reference its meaning, and meaning is always manifest in the relationship between. Something has meaning only to someone, and thus meaning is, once again, interactionist to the core.

(An important distinction needs to be made here, between a radical subjective-relativism in which the meaning of something is attributed solely to the someone who perceived the something — which denies any meaningful contribution to that meaning by the something in question — and the fundamental interactionist viewpoint I speak of, in which meaning is neither subjective nor objective but inhers in the relationship between subject and object)

No question that absolute certainty is not an available option, but not just because of the possibility of “getting things wrong” but also because, as I just said, meaning is between subject and object. If you and I are discussing something (like “physicalism”, for example :D), we start off spending a good deal of our effort reaching a consensus on whether or not we’re talking about the same thing when we use the words we use! And how do we do that? Well, meaning can be encoded in words, but does not consist of them, and so any meaning that can be encoded in one set of words can be encoded in a different set. And so you and I reencode and reencode, describing and discussing, until we are mutually satisfied that there’s some decently-broad definitional territory where either of us could go back to it and say it in yet a different way and expect the other to nod and say “yep, that’s what we’re discussing, all right”. But where we differ, if I encode that which makes sense to me and you don’t nod, and instead you say “but no, it seems to me that instead www xxx yyy zzz etc”, all I can do is continue to generate new ways of trying to explain, new encodings of the meaning. What I cannot do is establish, with any degree of confidence, that you fully understand what I’m trying to tell you, but disagree with it. In fact, I cannot do it at all!. Because as long as the matter at hand still has that meaning to me, the only conclusions available to me are that “if I could just do a better job of getting you to see things as I’m seeing them, you’d see what I see” or else “I am not seeing what I’m seeing because it isn’t like that after all”.

And the invisible component here is parallax. You know astronomy, right? The position of an item in the sky is described against its backdrop of other things in the sky around it, but between where the earth is in midwinter and where the earth is in midsummer, the position of an item relatively closer to us may appear to be in a different place against that backdrop. That’s parallax. In fact, for far closer objects in the sky, it could make a difference depending on whether you were viewing in Italy or in Argentina. Where you are when you observe has an affect on what you see, that’s parallax. We know there is a “parallax” of sorts with regards to how we see everything; when we’re trying to encode our meanings in language, we do resort to trying to hook in to what we know of the listener’s experience, background, etc. And when communication fails and we’re left sputtering, still convinced that if we could only bridge the gap and lead the other person to see things from our perspective, they’d see what we see, we do attribute that failure to not knowing a sufficiently good point of entry, an initial point of common shared perspective from which to branch them off from their current viewpoint and lead them over to ours.

Back to astronomy: Items way the hell-and-gone far away from us have no observable parallax. (We could theoretically see their positions shift against the backdrop if we could shift our own positions back & forth between places a lot farther apart than midwinter and midsummer, but at the maximum distances between the extremes that exist, no observable parallax). Continuing, therefore, with the analogy drawn, things that are not meaningfully different to us observer-folks even between the greatest variations in experience and whatnot — that rock over yonder, for example —we consider to be “objective”. Mind you, it’s meaning still inheres in the relationship between observer and observed, not in the thing itself unto itself, it’s just that switching from observer to another observer to yet another observer makes damn little difference in what gets experienced. IT’S A ROCK. It’s a THING. Its very thinginess, its physical-ness, is in part an attribute of our experience of it as something we all see in common and expect to see in common.

But other aspects of reality have a lot more “parallax”. It is what it is to me a sufficiently different thing than it is what it is to you, and moreover if I could indeed explain my perspective on it sufficiently that you fully understand how I see it, I will have changed you (the experience of understanding me will be part of your backdrop); moreover, in order to do so, I will have had to understand your vantage point well enough to find that point of entry and do that explaining, and that will have changed me, and when all is said and done neither of us may view the topic of interest as I originally did, nor as you originally did.

Once again, back to the analogy-board. When one is traveling over land from Amsterdam to Moscow, an awareness of the sphericality of the earth adds nothing useful. It’s simpler and easier to pretend that the land is flat, that you can navigate using only north, south, east and west as coordinates. You could do your travel planning using x, y, z coordinates in 3D space, but why bother? In similar fashion, most of everyday activity (including a great and useful chunk of the hard sciences) is best approached as if the world were a physical one, an objective one, with matter as the bottom-most buildilng block and processes being processes of things.

But philosophically, as a theory-of-what-is (and how we know it & understand it etc), physicalism & materialism and objectivism & etc are flat-earth oversimplifications that will lead you to insufficient or wrong conclusions about a variety of things.

4

I think there are two problems with this. Firstly, the practise of describing objects as “things consisting of interactions” is essentially a process of reduction. An animal can be described as a vast body of interacting cells, and, in turn, the cells can be described as the products of even more complex interactions at the molecular level. I’m not a scientist, but I can imagine this process going on for quite some time. Molecular interactions can be reduced to composites of atomic interactions which, in their turn, may possibly described in terms of quantum interactions. However, this cannot continue indefinitely. Sooner or later the process of interactionist reduction must stop at a physical body (no matter how small). To argue otherwise would be to argue that interactions between physical objects actually preceded the objects themselves, which is (I think) plainly absurd.

Secondly, I don’t think you really appreciate the broad scope of physicalism. More than corporeal bodies, it also encompasses the intangible forces which govern all interactions between those bodies (like gravity, for example). The interaction between a golf club and a golfball can really only be described in physical terms, referencing physical forces. These forces themselves are irreducible and cannot be described by interactionism as they govern interactions.

Interactionism cannot supplant physicalism because interactions can only arise from physical bodies and interactions themselves can be described in physical terms, which obviously fall under the rubric of physicalism.

5

I’d like to clarify this. Does “fundamental” mean at the string or whatever level? If so, my reading seems to indicate that you’re probably right - at this level interaction is fundamental. The example I saw was a universe with a single thing in it. There is no universe at all, being no observer (by definition) no time, no space, and no interactions. Space is defined by relationships/interactions.

If you mean at the macro level, I’d say that only the most trivial of physicalism does not include interactions. Here it is useful to talk about things, but again even the description of a thing involves interacting with it in some way. Is this what you mean by interactions being fundamental? I can’t disagree, but I think that demoting “thingness” too much could be misleading.

The interesting part comes when considering interactions between interactions - for example, ideas about ideas. At the conceptual level, you soon lose track of anything traditionally physical - telling stories and analyzing things that don’t exist and never will. However, at the physical level we store referents to these imaginary things in neurons or on paper - so no matter how abstract we think we’re getting, we’re still doing first level physical interaction - at the macro level.

Analogy: You can design data structures that manipulate pointers to arrays of pointers to arrays of pointers, to any desired level of absurdity. When executing, each of these things gets stuck in a register and/or memory element, so during execution we’re manipulating one level of data at each step of the process.

6

Why? Why is that any more absurd than to posit physical bodies that do not consist of processes running?

Examine physics as it applies to the small. You may be in for a shock.

7

Well, friend Sentient, as I said in my very first post to you, context is everything, so allow me to provide some here:

I don’t believe I have ever claimed that physicalism as a philosophy is logically inconsistent per se; I have, in fact, defended physicalism when appropriate . But your interpretation and application of physicalism is the one I’ve had to contend with in our debates, and some of the arguments you’ve put forth do strike me as logically self-defeating.

For example, at the end of your OP, you state that you “agree to some extent” that scientific evidence has a monopolistic influence on physicalism. I’m glad to see that you’ve mellowed a bit; in the same thread you cite, you voiced your opinion that “When it really comes down to it, we all consider scientific evidence as a cut above other kinds”.

In fact, throughout our debates, scientific evidence was not merely your preferred form of evidence, it was the only form of evidence you were willing to give credence. Since there is no scientific evidence that scientific evidence is the only credible form of evidence, I found your stance logically self-defeating.

Also, the validity of physicalism will (obviously) depend on what one means when using the word “physical”. In this thread I spent several pages trying to nail down exactly what you meant when referring to something as “physical” only to find out that it means you have arbitrarily pronounced everything to be physical. As usual, our friend Lib sums it up best:

Once again you cast me in the role of Buridan’s ass. As I’ve said before , you have every right to voice your opinion about anything, including your favored philosophy. Just as I have the right to refuse to embrace any philosophy, portions thereof or the whole shebang, should I find it unpersuasive.

Yes, I agreed that life is physical under this definition:

But then, what isn’t physical under that definition?

I agreed to what where now?

I do not recognize the viewpoint you have ascribed to me here; in fact, I have no idea what you’re talking about.

8

I’m actually quite sympathetic to this notion, or at least, to the notion that if one describes reality in terms of the physical, there is no reason to suppose that the physical is somehow more fundamental than the interactionist.

9

Oh, that’s it? That’s (at least a large part of) why you think physicalism is unreasonable, because it appeals to science without explicitly saying why? That wouldn’t strike me as being a debate about physicalism at all, really – it would be a debate about what constituted evidence for any statement or proposition. To try and draw some kind of parallel, if I advocated heliocentrism and appealed to “scientific evidence”, would you consider the heliocentric position logically self-defeating because I couldn’t provide scientific evidence that scientific evidence was the only credible source?

Understand, I’m trying to focus on precisely what is stopping you considering physicalism “unreasonable”. Or is it me, not physicalism per se, whose statements you cannot accept? (If so, perhaps it’s better if you pick on the Stanford sites’ sentences rather than mine, or something? I’d be happy to facilitate debate that way too, as best I could.) Believing yourself to be a biological machine does not require you to agree with any particular biological machine’s outputs – I have debates with other physicalists all the time, and I’m happy to be corrected when I do advance inconsistent positions on this or that. If “what counts as evidence” is one such example, well, that’s an interesting debate in which I admit I might be wrong. But that debate regarding epistemology would be a completely orthogonal issue to the confusion you express here (bolding mine):

…agreed? If the unfalsifiability of falsification (or however you’d like it put) is your beef, then such a beef applies equally well to all kinds of philosophical positions (and many of their opposites or alternatives, even!).

So, I’m happy to discuss science and evidence with you (like I said, I judge evidence in terms of its reliability, repeatability and “content” - in an Information Theory sense of what possibilities it forbids or allows - since this kind of evidence has most explanatory power), and the way I resolve what you consider logical self-defeat has a lot to do with my ‘couple of points’ above. But I think a completely separate thread would be appropriate – would you could do the honours with the OP, or shall I try again if I get time?

Well, you asked at the end of that post whether you’d mischaracterised my position, and I think you did, actually, as I tried to explain in the post immediately following yours. In fact, that word “arbitrary” introduced so much muddle that I think it was a mistake to bring it up at all without being very clear what we each meant by it, so perhaps it would be better to start afresh on that score – deal?

What I mean when I say that a molecule, rock, cell or PC is “physical” is that it is a bunch of particles in spacetime. God is not physical: he’s (supposedly) not in spacetime. The elan vital or epiphenomenal ectoplasm aren’t either – these things are (supposedly) nothing to do with the matter, energy, forces and whatnot. Now, I cannot demonstrate that “physical” is the word to describe a molecule, rock, cell or PC rather than another word, any more than I can demonstrate that the land mass south of Irian Jaya must be called “Australia”, the people who built the Acropolis must be called “Ancient Greeks”, or light of wavelength 570 nm must be called “green”. I can only propose such a label, and ask whether you agree that such a label is reasonable. (Note that I’m deliberately avoiding the ambiguous and confusing ‘a’ word here!) If you didn’t agree so, well, I’d have to ask you what is so reasonable about “Australia”, “Ancient Greek” and “green” that you do agree to use them so readily, while you cannot bring yourself to use “physical” similarly.

I assure you, all I and physicalism in general are suggesting is that we’re made of cells – it really isn’t much more complicated than that at heart (although the debates get complicated, certainly). So long as we agree that there are some physical things (which I’ve never heard you deny despite numerous opportunities, but I’m trying my best not to assume things here), we can go on to explore what combinations of those things might in principle produce. Is that a fair way to progress?

This, I think, might be why you say you can’t understand physicalism: because it just seems obvious to you that “shit” is all there is. Thus, I think it might be the case that physicalism isn’t the philosophy you don’t understand – in fact you understand it very well. It’s other philosophies, like theism or panpsychism, which you don’t understand very well, because they posit entities which aren’t “shit” in the context we’re discussing, of molecules/reactions, rocks/geology, cells/biology, chips/computation etc. Do you think this is at all accurate (or even fair)?

Sorry, wrong post. It was here that you agreed that computations were physical (so long as there was something around to call it so, which there tautologically was: You!)

OK, I must have misunderstood, and I apologise unreservedly – that’s why I explicitly invited correction in my OP. I hereby do so again: If an entity labels both life and computation “physical” (a situation which, of course, requires a labelling entity in the first place), can’t the labelling process itself arise from life and computation? I know this sentence is clumsy, but it seems that there is a fundamental blockage to progress between us which is caused by not being able to put a cart and a horse in the right order. I say that evolution yielded a ‘subjective’ labelling ability in highly complex organisms where before there was only rocks and sunshine and simple life. I’m not sure whether you consider this impossible for some circular reason or other.

10

Sentient, since I don’t want this to become primarily a quote/counter-quote exchange (although I realize a bit of that is inevitable), I’m not going to answer your last post point-by-point. Instead, I’m going to try to sweep the table clear and state my reservations about physicalism concisely, a few at a time, starting with the ones that nag me the most. If, in doing so, there is something specific from your last post that you’re still curious about, but I haven’t covered, let me know and I’ll try to address it directly.

Before I get started, it strikes me that there’s one thing that might need clarification, just so we don’t go barking up the wrong tree: If you’ll re-read my quote, you’ll see that I don’t understand why the physicalist position is dominant * in Cognitive Science and Philosophy of Mind*. IOW, it’s not that I find physicalism in and of itself unreasonable, just that I find the physicalist philosophical position as unreasonable as the others *when it comes to Cognitive Science and Philosophy of Mind *. That said…

I think my three head-scratchingest reservations with physicalism in Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science (PM/CS) are:

[ul]
[li]What is meant by the term “physical”[/li][li]What constitutes credible supporting evidence for a given argument or position (there are, of course, other philosophies that I have this same reservation about)[/li][li]Whether physicalism can provide a [sub]cough[/sub] “reasonable” explanation for consciousness (i.e., subjective awareness)[/ul][/li]
I’d like to tackle “What is meant by the term “physical” first. Understand, my purpose of wanting to dig into this is not so I can barrage you with an endless litany of: “Ok, then what is meant by the term “meaning”?, ““Ok, then what is meant by the term “term”?, “Ok, then what is meant by the term “what”?, ad nauseam.

Instead, my rationale for tackling this is twofold: first, because it’s the first question I would explore regardless of the philosophy presented to me, i.e., If someone says they subscribe to a philosophy of “physicalism”, my very first question would be “Physical-ism? Well, what exactly do you mean by the term “physical”?”, just as my first question to someone who says they subscribe to a philosophy of “theism” would be “Well, what exactly do you mean by the term “god”?

Second, when you say that “physical” means that something is a bunch of particles in spacetime, I can’t tell what unspoken assumptions you’re making; what forms the foundation of that seemingly simple, straightforward statement. For example, I’ve read works by physicists who appear bemused and slightly horrified that anyone would consider “particles” to reflect reality in any meaningful sense; instead claiming that what we refer to as “particles” are just highly functional mathematical models. To them, a “particle” is a useful fiction, a metaphor that allows us to speak with an easy familiarity about abstruse subjects, much like the way we say that RNA “unzips” DNA even though nothing remotely resembling a zipper is involved.

If what you mean by the term “physical” is that it can be advantageous in many ways to look at the world as if it were physical, I guess I wouldn’t argue with that any more than I’d argue with someone who said that it can be advantageous in many ways to look at the world as if it were a manifestation of God. But I don’t think that’s what you mean.

So with your indulgence, I’d like to start again at the beginning and ask you to expound on what you mean by the term “physical”, and perhaps more importantly, what that means for our concepts of reality, and the current state of PM/CS.

11

Sorry for the late reply, first off. I’ve been a bit busy. I may be completely misunderstanding you, but it seems to me that you’re arguing that matter, including the most elemental particles, arose from interactive processes. How can there be interaction in the absence of matter?

I must confess that, when it comes to science, I’m just an interested amateur and, as I intimated in my first post, if we need to take this discussion to the quantum level I may be out of my depth. Do you have any links, preferably written for the layman, which you think could help me get a better handle on your position?

12

other-wise, OK, that’s a sensible way to progress (but note that I’ll still eventually repeat much of what I’ve already said here). I’ll give a quick (over-) simple sentence answer for each of your Big 3 Questions to start with, and we can then expand and flesh them out at length. Though I should warn you - I think some of that expansion can really only proceed rather by analogy unless I can come up with some excellent new sentences I’ve never tried before in our interactions. Nonetheless, here goes:

Sentence: That which can be characterised as an arrangement in time and space of Matter, Energy and Forces (MEF).
Summary: Examples of entities which cannot be characterised this way (according to the vast majority of philosophers regardless of whether they ascribe to physicalism or not) are God, the afterlife, epiphenomenal ectoplasm, the elan vital, and consciousness under the panpsychic position. Modern physics at the very cutting edge could be said to propose that matter, energy and forces are themselves contingent on spacetime (which may itself be far greater in extent than merely 3 dimensions of space coupled with a single dimension of time), and that matter, energy, forces, space and time in our everyday lives are, if you like, a non-weird statistical average over enormous numbers of individually weird entities. However, for the purposes of this thread, it might be useful to forego such esoterics and begin from a mutual understanding of things like molecules, rocks, cells and PC’s. From here, these spatial MEF arrangements can be devloped into temporal MEF arrangements (remember the sentence: arrangement in time and space), which we can call “processes”.

Sentence: An ability to provide a logically consistent model of a given phenomena in terms of the aformentioned spatio-temporal arrangements of MEF (STAMEF).
Summary: The worth of such a model is measured by its ability to provide falsifiable predictions from which to construct “laws”, statistical regularities, causal mechanisms or any other central requirement of what I’d call an explanation. This is the criterion which, rightly or wrongly, we apply to positions such as heliocentrism, Darwinism and even certain aspects of Holocaust-Actually-Happened-ism in order to weigh up whether or not they are credible. Physicalism could be said to constitute the consensus in all of these disciplines, in which explanation by physical processes has superceded all other alternatives (eg. angels pushing planets and the sun around the Earth, vitalism/intelligent design and aspects of Holocaust denial).

Sentence: Strictly speaking, it doesn’t provide such itself – rather, it points to those disciplines where those explanations are to be found in principle.
Summary: Physicalism is the position that consciousness has a STAMEF basis: cognitive science is the multi-disciplinary pursuit of the specific explanations for the collection of phenomena we call “consciousness” themselves. What physicalism asks is that cognitive science be treated just like any other science. Biological and computational sciences have particular relevance, both containing significant explanatory gaps as well as theories which are not proven solely by singular, definitive experiments but by a range of results, facts and statistics taken together as a whole. In particular, the goal is not to attain some mythical “absolute” T-shirt slogan which explains every phenomenon in perfect precision, but merely to compete in explanatory power so strongly compared to, say, dualistic alternatives that to even consider the alternatives as approaching the same level of credibility is itself quite a bullet to bite. (To put enough splinters on the fence that only the numbest of posteriors remain there, so to speak.) I consider that the effect on consciousness of certain physical molecules and the enormous correlations between different cognitive functions and different physical regions of brain offal make the alternatives to physicalism as absurd as vitalism in biology or the idea that your PC has an afterlife (both of which the extremely numb-arsed might accept with little discomfort.)

So, I await your response to point 1) the meaning of “physical”, and we can go on to the others in due course - I expect this thread will take a number of weeks, actually. What I will say now, though, is that when you say you just don’t understand physicalism, or/nor why it is dominant, I have to say I have great trouble really believing you. Not that you’re lying or anything, but I have simply never come across anyone who was clearly so erudite in the relevant literature but expressed the overwhelming confusion you do, to the point where I think you’re . You complain of being cast as Buridan’s ass, but can you really say that physicalism appears to YOU to be just as unreasonable as, say, solipsism given the woeful explanatory shortcomings of the latter? Again I say: I think you understand phsyicalism just fine, and that although we can toss my specific outputs back and forth until we shape them into something you might eventually accept, you still have a good idea of what I’m trying to say. I simply understand how a chap as bright as you finds the three premises in my OP and the ‘couple of points’ below them so difficult: they really are as simple as they evidently seem to all your friends. If you plain disagreed with them and offered alternatives, like Lib, I can understand that just fine. But saying you don’t understand them? Is that really what you mean?

13

Erratum: … to the point where I think you’re unsure of your position regarding what you do and don’t understand!

14

Erratum #2: I simply don’t understand how a chap as bright as you finds the three premises in my OP and the ‘couple of points’ below them so difficult.

15

Your assumption here is that interactions must be interactions between bits of matter. I am saying that, while this may seem intuitively correct, there are sufficient reasons to suspect it may be factually wrong.

Permission to upend your everyday assumptions just a little bit? Do an Advanced Google search for exact phrase= “vacuum fluctuation” + required word= “universe”.

At every level that something can be posited as “matter”, it can be analyzed and understood in more detail as an interactive dance. We’ve known this for centuries (yonder rock consisting of separable compounds; compounds separating into molecules; molecules turning out to consist of atoms; atoms being comprised of subatomic particles…); but at the lower levels, the “bits” doing the interacting are less and less possessed of the types of properties we think of as “matter”. They don’t have “locations” in the conventional sense. They don’t lend themselves to being considered in isolation as readily as larger “particles”. Physicists find it more useful at times to speak of them as having a “tendency to occur” rather than “there is one of them here”. In other words, you start off sliding down a slope in which particles are composed of interactions, which in turn are interactions between smaller particles, which in turn are composed of interactions and so on, but as you get down towards the smallest scale events, it looks like interactions, not particles, are what has primacy.

16

I suppose the confusion is over this: inter-actions among what?

17

I’ve attempted to educate myself about physics as much as I can without going out and enrolling in a physics program, and I haven’t clue what the Hell any of this is supposed to mean. It sure looks like vacuous philosphizing about our ignorance as to what “really” constitutes the basic elements decribed in quantum field theory as particles and their interactions through virtual force carriers. Does any of this statement have any importance at the level of predictive rigor? Does it actually describe anything in any calcuable or observable way?

18

Processes.

It’s verbs all the way down :slight_smile:

19

Isn’t this indefensible, on account of it basically states “if I can explain something physically, then it did happen physically.”, when in actual fact it might not have? (I don’t see anywhere in the argument that disallows nonphysical things/events; merely statements requring that physical things do exist.)

Of course, if you turn around and say that everything is physical, than you actually just said that everything is ploogagabaph. Meaningless. Suppose I come up to you and levitate my check from Randi with my ESP, and there is no explanation of any kind for it. If you promptly define the ESP to be physical (though still unexplainable), then you have accomplished nothing.

I also don’t see why a given ‘thinking machine’ has to have become adequetely advanced to smack into Godel’s incompleteness theorem; I also don’t see why a ‘thinking machine’ need either be able to knowingly formulate false statements or contradictions, much less a self-aware uncertainty in its own results. Just because a meaty, wrinkly piece of hardware has the capability to support such an analysis doesn’t imply that it must actually occur, does it? Or is having reached that point a required precondition of being a ‘thinking machine’, rendering all statements of this type meaningless as well?

Is the goal here merely to support the claim that mankind’s mental activity could be entirely electrochemical? Of course it could be. That has been adequetely demonstrated for everybody (heh). Or, is the claim that it must be entirely electrochemical? The only way to prove that would be to demonstrate on an actual brain that all mental processes are observably the result of predictable physical processes. (Randomity allows the option that God is deciding the outcome of the dice.) If you actually proved this you would have demonstrated that mankind (or at least the dude you tested) is deterministic. Other than eliminating all debates about morality and ethics, what good would that serve?

Maybe I’m not seeing the point here.

20

Only the former, not the latter. Unnecessary does not mean impossible. Like I say, any thinking ape who says “must” could still be wrong, regardless fo experimental results (and who said anything about physical processes being predictable? Heck, I can’t tell you the weather here next month). If this seems a pointlessly obvious and reasonable position, well, me too.