Mind: flavors of monism/dualism

[Ren]

Anyway, that was fun

I feel so far like I can agree with everything I can tell you mention, and perhaps when the exact structure of my view comes out, you might find it's very compatible with yours.
I feel like the thing to be emphasized is just how general the conclusion is -- it's just saying qualia deserve explanation and that our present methods of describing the brain are not sufficient, at pains of accepting the very real conceivability of an abstract ontology.

The type of person who is anti-my-conclusion would typically be someone not in favor of ambitious metaphysics, and goes for a sober meat-and-potatoes view. I may be mistaken, but you really don't strike me as that type haha.
Broadly, I can imagine two very different ways someone would deny my type of argument: either take issue with the conclusion or the justification (these really are different, in that some may -- like Quine seems to -- accept the conceivability of an abstract ontology for our world, but not feel bothered enough about it to abandon orthodox physicalism -- this seems Quine's road). You definitely don't strike me as someone who would take strong issue with the conclusion. As for the justification, that remains to be seen -- I feel like so far, I'm not able to see any clear point of divergence at least. The idea behind my view is pretty standard to neutral monism takes: proponents do often enough accuse people of over-mathematicizing the physical.

The very specific way I cash out such a criticism (this objection that we're heading to an abstract ontology) is what is unique to my point over what I've encountered, but I so far feel it hits what bothers me best.

Hi charlie, I'm back from my trip to Paris.

I agree, this was fun and I definitely see at this point how our viewpoints have much in common. We don't have any in-depth substantial disagreements, I don't think. And I would agree with the following, essentially:

In absence of something like qualitative experience, I have no reason to suspect the mathematics is modeling something that is not-fully-mathematical.

Now, since we also both agree that there strongly seems to be something like qualitative experience, maybe a next topic of discussion, more positive/constructive in its approach, could be: how do we conceive of qualia and how do we conceive of "consciousness"? And how do we conceive of the relationship between the former and the latter.

 

[charlatan]

@Ren, yeah my point was almost totally destructive so far the point being to lay a very serious challenge to the orthodox varieties of physicalism, so that we can move to the plethora of other views. The idea is to consider the absurd proposition that, when we are gaining knowledge of the physical world, we really could simply be discovering one other mathematical structure, and that our special attention to planes crashing, people dying, and so on, is an illusion... that there is just mathematics and mathematics alone.

The basic idea being that to conceive of the physical as concrete, we seem to refer to qualia implicitly -- even if we can't attribute qualia to all (e.g. the subatomic), that there is some subset of the physical world we can experience seems essential to our conceiving of it as concrete.

Just to note how epistemic and not ontological this argument is, I'm even open to the idea that the world may be perfectly concrete sans qualia /some analogue that it is replaced with-- merely that we wouldn't know about that concreteness.



Now yes, the next step is to build a theory explaining the qualitative! I'm even open to the very idea being a flawed one, ironically what orthodox physicalists sometimes say. But, their solution is to just mathematize it away vs I think there's something about the idea of the qualitative that lets us tap into the concrete things in our world.
I'm open to non-orthodox physicalist, neutral monist, and dualist solutions.

As you probably have the more constructive thoughts of the two of us, why not you kick us off -- what are your theories? I'm gonna dump Ne intuitions the idea is to have fun, and remember I'm committing to having a much less solidly developed idea here than in the destructive phase

One place my intuitions tend to point to is I wonder if a deeper understanding of time will be key to a deeper understanding of experience. There has often been this accusation following the Einstein relativity revolution of a mathematizing (often referred to as the 'spatialization') of time, completely stripping the idea that it is 'flowing' and viewing it as a sort of static coordinate among the 4 dimensions akin to the way you locate a house on a cross-street. This might be an instance where yes, there was a truth to there being a flaw in our 'common sense' description of time as flowing, yet perhaps the mathematized version is also simplifying what is going on. (Sidenote -- I know little continental stuff, but I get the sense the continental guys criticize this spatialization of time a lot, and some like Heidegger seem to view the time-flow as very important to experience.)

One interesting thing there is that mathematically, the equations of physics are reversible at the fundamental level. The 'arrow' of time seems quite integral to our experiences. One thing I've toyed with is that maybe experience is sort of intrinsically spread out over time -- that the real illusion is the sense we have of there being discrete moments of it.
There's also a way in which this plays with the idea of self-consciousness, in the sense that perhaps it simply doesn't make sense for a 'sense of self' to exist at a single moment/it must be spread out over time in a non-discrete way.
It's worth noting this reversibility thing plays a role, because there is this idea (Popper talks about this once) that, without memory or something like it, it's hard to imagine self-awareness -- after all, if there's nothing about you to reflect back on, how to be self-aware? Yet this leads to a kind of unsolvable problem.... it seems like the first moment would always have to happen with no past sense of self to look back on....but this seems to dissolve a little if you don't view the moments as strictly ordered/see the arrow as more emergent, and if you don't commit to there ever being one discrete moment when consciousness begins....think of an open interval (a,b) rather than a closed one [a,b] ... so any moment in (a,b) has a past one, whereas t = a in [a,b] doesn't have a past one.

(It's to be understood at this point, on the constructive front, I just have intuitions on directions to consider, not any complete hypothesis...partly because I think it's very early to feel complete.)

 

[Ren]

@Ren, yeah my point was almost totally destructive so far the point being to lay a very serious challenge to the orthodox varieties of physicalism, so that we can move to the plethora of other views. The idea is to consider the absurd proposition that, when we are gaining knowledge of the physical world, we really could simply be discovering one other mathematical structure, and that our special attention to planes crashing, people dying, and so on, is an illusion... that there is just mathematics and mathematics alone.

The basic idea being that to conceive of the physical as concrete, we seem to refer to qualia implicitly -- even if we can't attribute qualia to all (e.g. the subatomic), that there is some subset of the physical world we can experience seems essential to our conceiving of it as concrete.

Just to note how epistemic and not ontological this argument is, I'm even open to the idea that the world may be perfectly concrete sans qualia /some analogue that it is replaced with-- merely that we wouldn't know about that concreteness.



Now yes, the next step is to build a theory explaining the qualitative! I'm even open to the very idea being a flawed one, ironically what orthodox physicalists sometimes say. But, their solution is to just mathematize it away vs I think there's something about the idea of the qualitative that lets us tap into the concrete things in our world.
I'm open to non-orthodox physicalist, neutral monist, and dualist solutions.

As you probably have the more constructive thoughts of the two of us, why not you kick us off -- what are your theories? I'm gonna dump Ne intuitions the idea is to have fun, and remember I'm committing to having a much less solidly developed idea here than in the destructive phase

One place my intuitions tend to point to is I wonder if a deeper understanding of time will be key to a deeper understanding of experience. There has often been this accusation following the Einstein relativity revolution of a mathematizing (often referred to as the 'spatialization') of time, completely stripping the idea that it is 'flowing' and viewing it as a sort of static coordinate among the 4 dimensions akin to the way you locate a house on a cross-street. This might be an instance where yes, there was a truth to there being a flaw in our 'common sense' description of time as flowing, yet perhaps the mathematized version is also simplifying what is going on. (Sidenote -- I know little continental stuff, but I get the sense the continental guys criticize this spatialization of time a lot, and some like Heidegger seem to view the time-flow as very important to experience.)

One interesting thing there is that mathematically, the equations of physics are reversible at the fundamental level. The 'arrow' of time seems quite integral to our experiences. One thing I've toyed with is that maybe experience is sort of intrinsically spread out over time -- that the real illusion is the sense we have of there being discrete moments of it.
There's also a way in which this plays with the idea of self-consciousness, in the sense that perhaps it simply doesn't make sense for a 'sense of self' to exist at a single moment/it must be spread out over time in a non-discrete way.
It's worth noting this reversibility thing plays a role, because there is this idea (Popper talks about this once) that, without memory or something like it, it's hard to imagine self-awareness -- after all, if there's nothing about you to reflect back on, how to be self-aware? Yet this leads to a kind of unsolvable problem.... it seems like the first moment would always have to happen with no past sense of self to look back on....but this seems to dissolve a little if you don't view the moments as strictly ordered/see the arrow as more emergent, and if you don't commit to there ever being one discrete moment when consciousness begins....think of an open interval (a,b) rather than a closed one [a,b] ... so any moment in (a,b) has a past one, whereas t = a in [a,b] doesn't have a past one.

(It's to be understood at this point, on the constructive front, I just have intuitions on directions to consider, not any complete hypothesis...partly because I think it's very early to feel complete.)

Yay, we're entering into the constructive phase! I'll answer more fully tomorrow.

 

[charlatan]

It might be the 6 in me, but I really enjoy the destructive part too haha

 

[Ren]

@Ren, yeah my point was almost totally destructive so far the point being to lay a very serious challenge to the orthodox varieties of physicalism, so that we can move to the plethora of other views. The idea is to consider the absurd proposition that, when we are gaining knowledge of the physical world, we really could simply be discovering one other mathematical structure, and that our special attention to planes crashing, people dying, and so on, is an illusion... that there is just mathematics and mathematics alone.

The basic idea being that to conceive of the physical as concrete, we seem to refer to qualia implicitly -- even if we can't attribute qualia to all (e.g. the subatomic), that there is some subset of the physical world we can experience seems essential to our conceiving of it as concrete.

Just to note how epistemic and not ontological this argument is, I'm even open to the idea that the world may be perfectly concrete sans qualia /some analogue that it is replaced with-- merely that we wouldn't know about that concreteness.



Now yes, the next step is to build a theory explaining the qualitative! I'm even open to the very idea being a flawed one, ironically what orthodox physicalists sometimes say. But, their solution is to just mathematize it away vs I think there's something about the idea of the qualitative that lets us tap into the concrete things in our world.
I'm open to non-orthodox physicalist, neutral monist, and dualist solutions.

As you probably have the more constructive thoughts of the two of us, why not you kick us off -- what are your theories? I'm gonna dump Ne intuitions the idea is to have fun, and remember I'm committing to having a much less solidly developed idea here than in the destructive phase

One place my intuitions tend to point to is I wonder if a deeper understanding of time will be key to a deeper understanding of experience. There has often been this accusation following the Einstein relativity revolution of a mathematizing (often referred to as the 'spatialization') of time, completely stripping the idea that it is 'flowing' and viewing it as a sort of static coordinate among the 4 dimensions akin to the way you locate a house on a cross-street. This might be an instance where yes, there was a truth to there being a flaw in our 'common sense' description of time as flowing, yet perhaps the mathematized version is also simplifying what is going on. (Sidenote -- I know little continental stuff, but I get the sense the continental guys criticize this spatialization of time a lot, and some like Heidegger seem to view the time-flow as very important to experience.)

One interesting thing there is that mathematically, the equations of physics are reversible at the fundamental level. The 'arrow' of time seems quite integral to our experiences. One thing I've toyed with is that maybe experience is sort of intrinsically spread out over time -- that the real illusion is the sense we have of there being discrete moments of it.
There's also a way in which this plays with the idea of self-consciousness, in the sense that perhaps it simply doesn't make sense for a 'sense of self' to exist at a single moment/it must be spread out over time in a non-discrete way.
It's worth noting this reversibility thing plays a role, because there is this idea (Popper talks about this once) that, without memory or something like it, it's hard to imagine self-awareness -- after all, if there's nothing about you to reflect back on, how to be self-aware? Yet this leads to a kind of unsolvable problem.... it seems like the first moment would always have to happen with no past sense of self to look back on....but this seems to dissolve a little if you don't view the moments as strictly ordered/see the arrow as more emergent, and if you don't commit to there ever being one discrete moment when consciousness begins....think of an open interval (a,b) rather than a closed one [a,b] ... so any moment in (a,b) has a past one, whereas t = a in [a,b] doesn't have a past one.

(It's to be understood at this point, on the constructive front, I just have intuitions on directions to consider, not any complete hypothesis...partly because I think it's very early to feel complete.)

I don't think that at this early stage, either of us is going to come forward with a full-fledged theory. I'll probably be doing quite a bit of 'dumping' too.

Just as a preliminary, as you familiar with such things as phenomenology, perspectivism, nominalism, fictionalism, the state-of-affairs ontology of Wittgenstein, etc.? It mixes elements of continental and analytic traditions but I will probably end up having to make use of these different concepts as I try to lay out my constructive perspective on the question of qualia, consciousness, ontological commitments, and so on.

 

[JediNinjaGundam]

I'm not as deep into those concept as some of you but if it's alright, I'd like to offer some of my thoughts on it.
It seems to me that a distinction between things such as mind and body, god and the universe, doesn't really make sense when you get to the core of things. It seems to me that we use concepts to define things but outside those concepts there are just things. If you think of a car and imagine removing a piece of it at a time, you begin to see that the concept of car starts to break down. Does it need a steering wheel to be a car, tires, the outer shell? Windows?. How much can I remove until it's not a car anymore? And, if I sit inside the car, what is really the difference between me and the car? If you say that I can be removed from the car and that is the difference, every part of the car can be removed. If you say that the fact I have a mind is the difference, a car can have artificial intelligence.
If the steering wheel could remove itself, wouldn't it still be apart of the car? If you see what I'm getting at, then you see the next question is, what's the difference between the car and the ground and so on. Once you see that, you can see that is your concepts that are getting in the way of the answer. Concepts create confusion because they try to mirror things that can't be mirrored

 

[JediNinjaGundam]

I'm not as deep into those concept as some of you but if it's alright, I'd like to offer some of my thoughts on it.
It seems to me that a distinction between things such as mind and body, god and the universe, doesn't really make sense when you get to the core of things. It seems to me that we use concepts to define things but outside those concepts there are just things. If you think of a car and imagine removing a piece of it at a time, you begin to see that the concept of car starts to break down. Does it need a steering wheel to be a car, tires, the outer shell? Windows?. How much can I remove until it's not a car anymore? And, if I sit inside the car, what is really the difference between me and the car? If you say that I can be removed from the car and that is the difference, every part of the car can be removed. If you say that the fact I have a mind is the difference, a car can have artificial intelligence.
If the steering wheel could remove itself, wouldn't it still be apart of the car? If you see what I'm getting at, then you see the next question is, what's the difference between the car and the ground and so on. Once you see that, you can see that is your concepts that are getting in the way of the answer. Concepts create confusion because they try to mirror things that can't be mirrored

I'm not as deep into those concept as some of you but if it's alright, I'd like to offer some of my thoughts on it.
It seems to me that a distinction between things such as mind and body, god and the universe, doesn't really make sense when you get to the core of things. It seems to me that we use concepts to define things but outside those concepts there are just things. If you think of a car and imagine removing a piece of it at a time, you begin to see that the concept of car starts to break down. Does it need a steering wheel to be a car, tires, the outer shell? Windows?. How much can I remove until it's not a car anymore? And, if I sit inside the car, what is really the difference between me and the car? If you say that I can be removed from the car and that is the difference, every part of the car can be removed. If you say that the fact I have a mind is the difference, a car can have artificial intelligence.
If the steering wheel could remove itself, wouldn't it still be apart of the car? If you see what I'm getting at, then you see the next question is, what's the difference between the car and the ground and so on. Once you see that, you can see that is your concepts that are getting in the way of the answer. Concepts create confusion because they try to mirror things that can't be mirrored

The computer posted my reply before I finished and the site won't let me edit or delete it.
I just wanted to add that concepts can't mirror things because they aren't the same as the things themselves. Things exist outside that which thinks about them.
Also, feel free to correct me if you disagree. This is just my understanding of monism and dualism based on what I read.

 

[charlatan]

@Ren I've generally come across those terms; I might not have a super-deep idea of all of it, but I think we can just go into it as and when it comes up!

For me, the main thing is developing a science of consciousness. I think the evidence about there being a clear link between physical events (neural events) and mental ones strongly suggests there should be a science of it.

So the main thing for that is: what physical systems have consciousness associated to them? Even if one doesn't think consciousness is something like a physical property (e.g. mathematical properties aren't physical, they're merely higher level properties OF the physical -- but they're not intrinsically physical the way, say, electric charge is).

 

[Ren]

It seems to me that a distinction between things such as mind and body, god and the universe, doesn't really make sense when you get to the core of things. It seems to me that we use concepts to define things but outside those concepts there are just things. If you think of a car and imagine removing a piece of it at a time, you begin to see that the concept of car starts to break down. Does it need a steering wheel to be a car, tires, the outer shell? Windows?. How much can I remove until it's not a car anymore? And, if I sit inside the car, what is really the difference between me and the car? If you say that I can be removed from the car and that is the difference, every part of the car can be removed. If you say that the fact I have a mind is the difference, a car can have artificial intelligence.
If the steering wheel could remove itself, wouldn't it still be apart of the car? If you see what I'm getting at, then you see the next question is, what's the difference between the car and the ground and so on. Once you see that, you can see that is your concepts that are getting in the way of the answer. Concepts create confusion because they try to mirror things that can't be mirrored

Hi @JediNinjaGundam — what you are saying here is actually quite close to my personal ontological convictions. I think you are right that concepts are to an extent artificial and limiting and that it is not true that they 'perfectly reflect' reality. I would extend this to objects and so-called 'categories' in general. (PS: I am a monist and this is also what grounds my approach to fictionalism.) That being said, nothing prevents us in conversation from allowing such categories to come to our help, for the sake of clarification, explanation, justification, illustration, modelling, etc. The gist of the idea is that you can speak within a certain philosophical discourse without thereby being ontologically committed by the terms that you use as part of this discourse.

Based on what you write, you come across as an anti-realist or at least a very cautious/timid realist. This would also be close enough to where my metaphysical convictions lie.

 

[charlatan]

I'm not too decided at the moment on realism/antirealism, but I tend to go by the fact that even anti-realists tend to agree that some ontological frameworks may be reasonably said to be more useful for some purpose, and I think this is the attitude they must adopt when it comes to, for instance, taking science seriously.

That's to be born in mind for discussions about the metaphysics of mind -- that is, one may doubt whether there is a determinate answer as to whether 'quarks' and 'electrons' exist, but that doesn't tend to affect how we do scientific theorizing much. I'd guess the same is true of a 'science of consciousness'...

 

[Ren]

@Ren I've generally come across those terms; I might not have a super-deep idea of all of it, but I think we can just go into it as and when it comes up!

For me, the main thing is developing a science of consciousness. I think the evidence about there being a clear link between physical events (neural events) and mental ones strongly suggests there should be a science of it.

So the main thing for that is: what physical systems have consciousness associated to them? Even if one doesn't think consciousness is something like a physical property (e.g. mathematical properties aren't physical, they're merely higher level properties OF the physical -- but they're not intrinsically physical the way, say, electric charge is).

Our approaches to consciousness start from very distinct philosophical regions, but hopefully we will be able to meet along the way. I'll still try to express my viewpoint in a way that facilitates dialogue.

At the moment I'm very attracted to the idea of neutral monism with emergent/higher-order manifestations as e.g. physical and experiential. However, I tend to conceive of this neutral 'substrate' as completely immanent and primitively factualist. Do you remember when last year you mentioned the possibility of associating the neutral with « information » ? This is something close to my idea. But rather than information per se, I tend to take the neutral stuff as made up of primitive facts. A primitive fact would be what composes a state of affairs that either obtains or does not obtain in the world. If the state of affairs obtains in the world, I call it an event. (This also echoes Russell's early attempt at determining his neutral monism in terms of an ontology of events.)

Now, it may be possible to conceive of the physical and the experiential, for example, as higher-order manifestations of the primitively factual. If something takes place, i.e. an event, it has a fundamental factual structure, which may be roughly captured in a proposition. But it never takes place just as itself – when the content of a state of affairs is actualized, it is both actualized as physical and as experiential. Where the perspectivism comes into play is that maybe, every entity that exists has its own way of relating to the physical and the experiential – its own 'perspective' on the physical and the experiential. And on this line of interpretation, the way in which the entity called human being relates to the physical and the experiential, is through what we call “consciousness”. However, consciousness here would only name human being's own manner of experiencing the world, which is only just "one" such manner.

So the question becomes perhaps not so much: “how is consciousness possible?”, but rather: “what exactly is consciousness?” — that is, how can we describe the particular way in which human being experiences events as objects, qualia, and so on. But the event itself (as the actualization of the state of affairs) would be more primitive than the physical object or the qualia. The latter would be higher-order manifestations of the immanent event. An interesting challenge that I've been facing with this viewpoint in mind is providing an account of consciousness in terms of its emerging from “human neutral facts” in the specific way that it does – keeping in mind that both the physical and the experiential would still emerge, but differently (i.e. not in the consciousness way) in the case of “non-human neutral facts”. Any thoughts?

This is pretty rough and not a completely accurate rendition of my view, but it will suffice as a sketch for now.

 

[charlatan]

At the moment I'm very attracted to the idea of neutral monism with emergent/higher-order manifestations as e.g. physical and experiential. However, I tend to conceive of this neutral 'substrate' as completely immanent and primitively factualist. Do you remember when last year you mentioned the possibility of associating the neutral with « information » ? This is something close to my idea. But rather than information per se,

Sounds good, I think when I say 'information,' I intend it to be quite broad, and what you say certainly counts.

An interesting challenge that I've been facing with this viewpoint in mind is providing an account of consciousness in terms of its emerging from “human neutral facts” in the specific way that it does – keeping in mind that both the physical and the experiential would still emerge, but differently (i.e. not in the consciousness way) in the case of “non-human neutral facts”. Any thoughts?

Here is the question -- so you want (as most neutral proponents do) to see the qualitative and physical as 'higher order' -- do you think of these two as ultimately neutral, i.e. 'reducible to the neutral,' or ultimately irreducible to it?
(The analogy here would be heat is a higher order part of the physical world, but it is ultimately physical, whereas the mathematical structure of the physical world is higher order, but it isn't physical, ultimately -- because another world could have the same structure while being different in actuality.)

I myself wonder if a more reductive or nonreductive form is most appropriate. I think that would depend a lot on whether we think the idea of qualia as we traditionally conceive it is misleading and must be done away with in favor of something else (like the neutral), or if it is just fine, and merely higher level.
Basically, is the 'neutral' somehow capable of producing an illusion of genuine qualia?

(Remember, I am not committed to qualia being genuinely there, but rather that the sense that they are there seems to be essential to take seriously, as that sense seems to be our only clue -- whether or not other clues are possible -- of the concreteness of the world.)

 

[charlatan]

I wanted just to return to this point @Ren brought up in his audio post, just because it was a very important point, and I consider my response to that a key part of what's going on. He mentioned that the mathematics used in physics is not supposed to be evidence that the physical could be totally mathematical in nature, but rather it's just a formalization of our more informal accounts of the physical.

And my emphasis was that, when he cashed out why there is more, he also appealed to the capacity to experience the physical. The point is orthodox physicalism wants to say that there is actually nothing stated in the experiential conceptualization that can't be captured in the mathematical language.

There is, actually, a kind of powerful motivation for this sort of thing. The idea is that whatever we say will be in some language -- in other words, something like a model of reality. I could write a computer program to capture all the goings on in my house, but there is nothing about doing so that means the computer program IS the house. It is still just a model of the house.

That is, let's even allow phenomenal, non-mathematical language -- like saying "ow the pain hurts." Someone could say that what I'm saying is making the same mistake as going "how can you distinguish the pain from the word/language you use to describe it".



However, this is exactly not what I'm saying -- I am not denying that at some point, we are using language to represent reality. In fact, language can be used to describe concrete things. But not all language. I'm saying mathematical language could never capture something seeming concrete .... some language could, though.


Note that it might be possible to uniquely designate every physical entity with some mathematical marker, too -- that could be a complete account in one sense of the word complete!!!
But the non-mathematical language/conceptualization remains indispensable is my point. Kinda like saying you could uniquely designate every item in my house with numbers but to know this model refers to my house, you need more.

 

[charlatan]

Oh yeah. I should mention -- traditional physicalists may respond to all this by saying their language is not entirely mathematical, because they use what they call functional language -- which is basically mathematical language together with causal relations of some kind e.g. the disposition of the brain to act this or that way. The injecting of mention of causal relations into our language would seek to avoid the charge of a completely mathematical language entirely.

Now, this is exactly my issue: what is this strategy going to amount to? You just take a purely mathematical structure and declare some of the structural relations to be causal. That gives a completely unconvincing account, to my mind, of what it is about the entity described by the structure that makes it seem to have causal relations.

In fact, to take the analogy further, imagine I have a mathematical structure consisting of sets/functions/etc. Now say I claim I now instantiated it. If one cashes that out, it cannot literally mean that you made the mathematical structure itself concrete.
Rather, you must have made a world of which the mathematical structure is only a part of the properties.

What I'm open to is that there may be a functional account of consciousness in the sense that the mathematical conceptualization refers to the same property as the phenomenal one.
But what that would amount to is that both are incomplete conceptualizations requiring a mediator (surprise surprise a neutral one).


One of my intuitions is also the age old question --- why does mathematics even describe the world? I think the fact that remains a question supports my point...that we don't understand the deeper nature of the physical

 

[charlatan]

Another important way of looking at this point is that I don't think, even if the structural relations in our mathematical conceptualization of the physical world are causal, that we can make sense of saying that, sans any further explanation of why, they seem causal to us. What would it even mean for relations to seem causal? Rather, there can seem to be certain concrete properties in the world, and then we would have to think various structural relations underlying the mathematics modeling the world are representing causal (not just abstract) relations.

 

[Ren]

Oh right, lots of new messages here! Good stuff. I’m travelling again so I might end up resorting to another voice recording at some point this weekend, when I have digested your content. Or else by text if I find the time.

 

[charlatan]

Yeah, @Ren this is of course more just expanding on the side of why I don't find the orthodox varieties of physicalism very convincing as of today (so addendum to the destructive parts).

The very short version is that, when you spoke to the idea that our mathematical language merely formalizes our understanding of the physical world (but ultimately did seem to agree you'd appeal to some of the more experiential qualities to distinguish it as concrete), I wanted to emphasize that I fully see we'd have to use some language to describe the world, and that doesn't mean the language is the same as the world. (That might be what someone says -- just because I just mathematics to describe it doesn't mean it IS mathematics...) the problem there is that mathematics is, by itself, incapable of capturing what is concrete about a world. Some other language may be.
Right now, our situation seems that what lets us conceptualize the world as concrete is our ability to experience it. This does not rule out that our experiential and mathematical language may be describing the same things -- but it's clear they are describing different aspects of the same thing, because one could apply to an abstract object, whereas the other couldn't.
I added that I think simply calling the structural relations causal without giving any reason to suppose causality seems to me fully unwarranted -- I dislike the 'functionalism' interpretations for this reason.

 

[charlatan]

The more I think of this, the more I realize this point is quite independent of the claim that the apparent presence of qualia is our justification for regarding some of the world as concrete.

Rather, it seems like at the very very very basic level, I don't think one can simply say "it seems to me that the world is concrete" -- as an empty matter. Rather, one must be in some way be of the view that it seems it has certain features that cannot be abstract -- whatever they are (I think qualia hold the best candidate for what these features are in our world, but even that need not be expected).

 

[charlatan]

Just adding ideas as they occur to me (obviously just feel free to read whatever you can/it's just to include for completeness) -- I think it's worth noting another thing about abstract worlds. One might think that, even if the world is abstract as Quine toyed with once, you could just as well say for all practical purposes, it's the same.... we'd still be part of this mathematical structure (the part of it that corresponds to what we call the brain would be where the orthodox physicalist would locate us), so we would preserve the intuition that we are part of this world and we're studying the world we're in -- which preserves concreteness for all practical purposes. Indeed, it may even give epistemic warrant to suppose the world is concrete, even if we're ultimately modeling its more abstract structure.

However, this 'for all practical purposes' thing doesn't seem to me right. The very reason we tend to locate the mind within the physical world at all is to preserve the idea that the mind has causal powers. That is one of the oft-mentioned objections to dualism -- that as far as reasonable science says, the physical world is causally closed, meaning the mind is either causally inert or is part of the physical world in some way.

But in a mathematical world, there are no causal relations. There is then no harm in locating the mind in any mathematical structure whatsoever which happens to admit a way of encoding all that we want the mind to encode information-wise---even in a mathematical structure other than that of our physical world!

As a note, this is quite parallel/related to many discussions of why the standard objections to computational theories of mind saying 'pretty much anything implements any computation' are moot -- generally, this is cashed out in terms of there needing to be appropriate causal relations. But if there is no such thing, then the 'pretty much anything encodes anything' point is no longer moot.

 

[charlatan]

By the way, I apologize sorta for the barrage -- maybe all this is obvious (given you already said you see the point that without something at least like qualitative experience, who knows if the mathematics models something concrete or not), but I'm just going extra in depth to be super cautious. I feel some of these are subtle