What Kind of Metaphysician Are You?

[Ren]

There's continental philosophy -- have you tried that? Analytic philosophy tends to emphasize logic/language, and the continental types think this limits what can be captured

For me personally, some of the best stuff is kind of in between, hard to classify, or has influenced both approaches like Wittgenstein

 

[Ren]

Yeah, I knew you were going to ask
And it's a good question -- I think it's reasonable to say, e.g. when we talk about 'the guy who murdered my friend,' that we're really talking about the guy, the cause of the murder, not just the property we know about. Similarly we may be talking of wild things when we do physics, just we may describe only the surface properties we know.


As for the deflating of consciousness, it really depends how one does it. I think the option by brute-scientists who say "our physics is real consciousness is a useful fiction" seems very much motivated by a kind of brute-force conservatism and I'm very skeptical of that. It's the sort of thing that wants progress in science and thus will try to push mystery to the side a little too dogmatically.

Thoughtful ways of saying we should not blindly accept common sense views of consciousness are different. Those, I take seriously.

The main thing I am very skeptical of in attempts to deflate consciousness, though, is that the thing they replace it with is usually either just as fancy or seems not to do the job. There's a standard view that all of mind is conceptual, and that phenomenal non-conceptual properties simply don't exist. I don't see why one would be any more willing to accept that our minds 'grasp logical propositions directly' than to accept they have phenomenal properties.

I still need to answer this, but I can barely keep my eyes open. Tomorrow then, charlie

 

[charlatan]

I guess it was probably quite clear from context, but I was of course saying I don't get why one would opt for conceptual mind and deflate non-conceptual mind if one's motivation is a brute conservatism with respect to science. I certainly think there are interesting options in that direction if one isn't such a brute conservative.
heck, if we're going to be brute conservative, I don't see why rule out external world skepticism.

Anyway, I think my stance on deflating consciousness is I don't yet see what the very serious motivation would be for that at least from the standpoint of seeking what the world is like (vs an intellectually interesting exercise -- fro that standpoint it's very fascinating), and until I see a reason to do it, my first inclination is not to, if that makes sense. I think there are certainly thoughtful ways to try, and I certainly go down that road for fun often, but basically, I tend to take both empirical science and my conscious experience and my mathematical reasoning (basically, things it seems very hard to seriously doubt) seriously until there is very strong reason otherwise, when it comes to giving my best pronouncement of what's true.

 

[Deleted member 16771]

For me personally, some of the best stuff is kind of in between, hard to classify, or has influenced both approaches like Wittgenstein

Or like Heidegger... between Wissenschaft and Weltanschauungen.

 

[Ren]

As for the deflating of consciousness, it really depends how one does it. I think the option by brute-scientists who say "our physics is real consciousness is a useful fiction" seems very much motivated by a kind of brute-force conservatism and I'm very skeptical of that. It's the sort of thing that wants progress in science and thus will try to push mystery to the side a little too dogmatically.

Yeah, I would also be skeptical of of any kind dogmatic deflationism, of consciousness or otherwise.

I guess it was probably quite clear from context, but I was of course saying I don't get why one would opt for conceptual mind and deflate non-conceptual mind if one's motivation is a brute conservatism with respect to science. I certainly think there are interesting options in that direction if one isn't such a brute conservative.
heck, if we're going to be brute conservative, I don't see why rule out external world skepticism.

Anyway, I think my stance on deflating consciousness is I don't yet see what the very serious motivation would be for that at least from the standpoint of seeking what the world is like (vs an intellectually interesting exercise -- fro that standpoint it's very fascinating), and until I see a reason to do it, my first inclination is not to, if that makes sense. I think there are certainly thoughtful ways to try, and I certainly go down that road for fun often, but basically, I tend to take both empirical science and my conscious experience and my mathematical reasoning (basically, things it seems very hard to seriously doubt) seriously until there is very strong reason otherwise, when it comes to giving my best pronouncement of what's true.

How about the following motivation: attempting to solve the problem of the bridging of the subject/object distinction? Perhaps what's called for is not so much a deflation of consciousness as a new interpretation/conceptualization of it. It seems to me that accepting the subject/object distinction within the intentionality of consciousness potentially strengthens the case of the panpsychists. How does the conscious ego come to objectify in a unitary way what lies outside of it and appears to consciousness through successive states, how does consciousness temporalize objects in relation to its own temporality, etc. Seems tempting to just say: it's a metaphysical substance of its own! Though of course, this leads to the objections usually levelled at the dualists, I guess.

 

[charlatan]

How about the following motivation: attempting to solve the problem of the bridging of the subject/object distinction? Perhaps what's called for is not so much a deflation of consciousness as a new interpretation/conceptualization of it.

So that's a great motivation -- I tend to think that's best accommodated by various neutral monist views, where on the one hand, we accept there are subjective experiences as sort of higher level features that follow from the neutral properties *and* accept that there needs to be an intermediary between these intrinsically private (qualia) and intrinsically public (traditionally-physical-scientific) features.

It avoids the charge against dualism that says it's unclear how consciousness plays a causal role in physical nature (note as a matter of history, there's no intrinsic objection to dualism accommodating this so much as the evidence of physical science strongly suggests the physical world has no outside influences affecting it, so any influence consciousness has must be made compatible with the physical).
Basically by saying the neutral things do act causally, and we can say there's a 'what it feels like' higher level component to performing these causal effects, rather than it floating off independent of being a component of the stuff that does act causally, thus doing nothing.

I must say that's kind of where I am right now. A neutral monist 'physicalism'.
If you don't wanna call it physicalism no problem. If not this, I expect we're very very very mistaken about qualia, and a lot of other things, and a lot of

It still preserves the private, intrinsically subjective feature of qualia, however, so it seems to get the best of all worlds.

Of course this isn't deflating, it's just saying there's a deeper underlying theory by which to interpret mental properties. I guess that's the sort of thing you're hoping for?

Note what this doesn't do is suggest we're mistaken about the nature of subjective experience fundamentally. it just says there's something more to it.
What I most associate with deflating consciousness (vs just deepening) is views that suggest there is some problem with the very idea.

I take those views very seriously, if they're not brute force, but ultimately what I find is they almost always seem to lead to a deeper view rather than a deflated view (i.e. you retain qualia rather than getting rid of them, and they are what you think they are, but there is more to their existence than you knew versus the concept being incoherent).

 

[Ren]

Falsification isn't science either, its philosophy. It is a perfect example of why philosophy must be tethered to real problems in science. What other way can I determine whether it is a real issue worth solving? Suppose I were to ask "What is the humidity of love?". It might be a real question worth solving, but without knowing where the problem came from, we can't possibly know. In fact, since I can't point you to any real controversy, it can be summarily rejected.

It doesn't matter how many rules of reason meta-physicians follow, if you cant point to the controversy, why should I accept "what is the nature of reality" as a meaningful question?

Well, maybe you could take a practical problem that likely would speak to you, such as: can AI develop consciousness? Which would lead to the question: what is the relationship between something purely physical and consciousness, or is consciousness a purely physical affair, or emergent from physical properties, etc. And this is already the domain of metaphysics. Depending on the stance one takes on the question of AI and consciousness, a certain metaphysical position will be implicit within the stance taken. I guess metaphysicians say something like: instead of taking this metaphysical position for granted, let's subject it to scrutiny also, in order to ground the scientific stance better.

 

[Ren]

So that's a great motivation -- I tend to think that's best accommodated by various neutral monist views, where on the one hand, we accept there are subjective experiences as sort of higher level features that follow from the neutral properties *and* accept that there needs to be an intermediary between these intrinsically private (qualia) and intrinsically public (traditionally-physical-scientific) features.

It avoids the charge against dualism that says it's unclear how consciousness plays a causal role in physical nature (note as a matter of history, there's no intrinsic objection to dualism accommodating this so much as the evidence of physical science strongly suggests the physical world has no outside influences affecting it, so any influence consciousness has must be made compatible with the physical).
Basically by saying the neutral things do act causally, and we can say there's a 'what it feels like' higher level component to performing these causal effects, rather than it floating off independent of being a component of the stuff that does act causally, thus doing nothing.

I must say that's kind of where I am right now. A neutral monist 'physicalism'.
If you don't wanna call it physicalism no problem. If not this, I expect we're very very very mistaken about qualia, and a lot of other things, and a lot of

It still preserves the private, intrinsically subjective feature of qualia, however, so it seems to get the best of all worlds.

Of course this isn't deflating, it's just saying there's a deeper underlying theory by which to interpret mental properties. I guess that's the sort of thing you're hoping for?

Note what this doesn't do is suggest we're mistaken about the nature of subjective experience fundamentally. it just says there's something more to it.
What I most associate with deflating consciousness (vs just deepening) is views that suggest there is some problem with the very idea.

I take those views very seriously, if they're not brute force, but ultimately what I find is they almost always seem to lead to a deeper view rather than a deflated view (i.e. you retain qualia rather than getting rid of them, and they are what you think they are, but there is more to their existence than you knew versus the concept being incoherent).

Interesting stuff! I hope the discussion we had last year about various possible species of neutral monism contributed to your refinement and tentative espousal of that position

Ok, so about the parts that struck me the most in what you developed. First, there is this bit:

I tend to think that's best accommodated by various neutral monist views, where on the one hand, we accept there are subjective experiences as sort of higher level features that follow from the neutral properties *and* accept that there needs to be an intermediary between these intrinsically private (qualia) and intrinsically public (traditionally-physical-scientific) features.

What do you mean exactly - i.e. in philosophical terms - by this "intermediary"? You see, it's just that whenever I come across terms like this, I tend to think: that's what's going to serve as the bridge between the two difficult to reconcile domains that we are trying to reconcile. I am not so sure, personally, that the distinction is so clear-cut between what you call the "intrinsically private" and the "intrinsically public". It seems to me that they bleed into one another in some way, that neither one is wholly intrinsically public nor private. But supposing that this is so, as it might well be, I would be interested to hear more about what you mean by this notion of intermediary-ness. I often think of the concept of mediation as evocative of dualism.

I was struck by this other passage, especially the notion of qualia as a "what it feels like" higher component:

Basically by saying the neutral things do act causally, and we can say there's a 'what it feels like' higher level component to performing these causal effects, rather than it floating off independent of being a component of the stuff that does act causally, thus doing nothing.

Are you saying, roughly speaking, that qualia would be a little bit like higher order properties of neutral, and that their essence is a kind of 'whatitfeelslikeness' as experienced in consciousness? That's an interesting lead, which you had already sketched in our previous discussion. The one thing that I'm still not sure about is what is left of the physicalism of your neutral monism. Presumably, if your basic stuff is neutral stuff, that's not physical stuff; or do you mean that the neutral stuff is equivalent to physical stuff? If not, does physical emerge as higher order "next to" qualia and their whatitfeelslikeness, or is it somehow still more 'basic' than qualia?

I guess I'm not sure why you need neutral in your framework, rather than say, just physical as the basic stuff with qualia as higher-order properties of physical in consciousness.

 

[wolly.green]

Well, maybe you could take a practical problem that likely would speak to you, such as: can AI develop consciousness? Which would lead to the question: what is the relationship between something purely physical and consciousness, or is consciousness a purely physical affair, or emergent from physical properties, etc. And this is already the domain of metaphysics.

This is a good start. But it doesn't justify the question "what is the nature of reality."

Depending on the stance one takes on the question of AI and consciousness, a certain metaphysical position will be implicit within the stance taken.

Sure, but in this case, the question "what is the nature of reality" is not implicit, it is explicit. Thus it is subject to reason and criticism. Further, it's not clear that it follows logically from controversies about "emergence." Why does the question "what is the relationship between the physical and abstract" implicitly imply that "what is the nature of reality" is a valid question worth exploring?

I guess metaphysicians say something like: instead of taking this metaphysical position for granted, let's subject it to scrutiny also, in order to ground the scientific stance better.

Exactly. And the first criticism that appears to me is "is this a valid question". Personally, I see no reason to believe it is since there is no real controversy equivalent to the problem of demarcation.

 

[charlatan]

I guess I'm not sure why you need neutral in your framework, rather than say, just physical as the basic stuff with qualia as higher-order properties of physical in consciousness.

Yeah, and that's the point, there are varieties of 'neutral monism' that are best classified as varieties of physicalism (and thus already exactly doing what you say -- physical as the basic stuff with higher order qualia) -- there are varieties of physicalism that more or less say the so-called quantitative properties that we associate with fundamental physics theories do not reveal the full nature of the physical properties we need to include in our full ontology, and that this full nature is neutral. Neutral between what and what? That's where one has to be careful to avoid confusion.

The neutral is not neutral between the ultimate-physical and the mental so much as neutral between the properties revealed to us via qualia and the mathematical properties described in fundamental physics via present-day methods. So there are varieties of physicalism that are basically already neutral monism...but this is important to distinguish because there are varieties that don't accept the robust reality of qualia.

Just to give an example of what this looks like -- we might say to find the full nature of the mysterious wavefunction of quantum mechanics requires investigating properties that are of quite different a nature and deeper a nature than we've been able to as of date.

I tend to think the most plausible answers are some neutral-monist-flavored variety of physicalism. The alternatives are the ones that often say qualia are essentially illusory, and these acknowledge that they don't see how fundamental physics would explain them using existing techniques, but they say the solution is deflating qualia in some way. How much they deflate qualia varies.

Of course, I'm still tentative and open to all approaches but I sort of default to the approach that seems consistent with the hardest-to-deny data, and that's that physical science works marvelously well, and qualia seem robustly real. Either can be denied, we can be anti-realists towards either, but it's the sort of thing where I start off thinking they're likely real and then try to see if there's any incoherence to either.

I'm very open to reconceptualizing qualia significantly, but it seems that will just lead one away from traditional physical science, as if anything, to introduce into our ontology something fancy enough to truly reconceptualize qualia on deeper grounds seems to promise disturbing the bastions of tradition.

Presumably, if your basic stuff is neutral stuff, that's not physical stuff; or do you mean that the neutral stuff is equivalent to physical stuff?

This goes back to what we said earlier, which is where you asked 'why call it physicalism' -- well because what if we really think charge, mass, etc are the fundamental properties of the world but just believe their nature deeper than what our mathematical models have told us, and that this deeper nature can account for the emergence of qualia?

Again, neutral not between physical and qualia, but rather between the epistemic, not ontological notion of physical (i.e. physical-as-far-as-we-know vs physical-as-it-really-exists-in-reality) and qualia.

Basically this is a variety of nonreductive physicalism.

 

[charlatan]

It seems to me that they bleed into one another in some way, that neither one is wholly intrinsically public nor private

Well either you don't think there's private vs public chasm (you say likely not) or you do, and it seems either you'll acknowledge the dichotomy and view both as emergent from the neutral or not acknowledge it, deflate both, and still call reality neutral between private and public in the sense that they bleed into one another. All roads lead to the neutral?

Intermediary just means since, to the extent there is such a dichotomy, we can't reduce either side to the other, we need to either get rid of the dichotomy or bridge the sides -- and ensure the fundamental properties of the world are capable of doing such

As to whether they bleed or not it's hard to say -- it certainly seems quite reasonable to suppose there might be a truly private side whether or not it turns out right. I don't think there's any sense I can make of feeling your pain directly, for instance, even if I can measure the brain-states associated to your pain.

OTOH, perhaps when you get to the truly subatomic levels, there is a sense in which these distinctions between public and private no longer happen. But maybe they're still emergently there?
Are the public/private domains higher level features that are legitimately there, or are they simply incoherent when one understands reality more deeply?

Great questions to ponder!

 

[charlatan]

BTW --- what would a non-physical neutral monism be? One where the fundamental properties of the world are NOT mass, charge, spin, etc and rather are not things discovered by our best physical science. Maybe the fundamental properties are rather totally different, call it neutral-property-1, neutral-property-2, and so on!
Saying our physical science is capable of uncovering the fundamental ontology of the world incompletely is different from saying it's incapable of it, and e.g. that perhaps what it's found is, like qualia, just a higher-level property. Perhaps the deepest reality of neutral-1 and neutral-2 cannot be measured quantitatively at all...I mean, to build a wacky theory, what if there's only some extra-sensory mode of knowing them. Obviously I don't believe that theory, but it's to make clear that by no means does a neutral monist flavored theory have to be physicalist.

I'd say a good rule of thumb is if we can always predict/deterall the properties of nature from the mathematical ones as we've been doing that some kind of physicalism is likely true. E.g. today we may not equate qualia with the physical, but we still think if I fixed all the numbers of physics that the mental experiences that would correspond to the brain state are predicted by those numbers. We may not think that those numbers are all there is to the physical or that they alone explain the emergence of qualia, as opposed to predict it.

 

[Ren]

BTW --- what would a non-physical neutral monism be? One where the fundamental properties of the world are NOT mass, charge, spin, etc and rather are not things discovered by our best physical science. Maybe the fundamental properties are rather totally different, call it neutral-property-1, neutral-property-2, and so on!
Saying our physical science is capable of uncovering the fundamental ontology of the world incompletely is different from saying it's incapable of it, and e.g. that perhaps what it's found is, like qualia, just a higher-level property. Perhaps the deepest reality of neutral-1 and neutral-2 cannot be measured quantitatively at all...I mean, to build a wacky theory, what if there's only some extra-sensory mode of knowing them. Obviously I don't believe that theory, but it's to make clear that by no means does a neutral monist flavored theory have to be physicalist.

I'd say a good rule of thumb is if we can always predict/deterall the properties of nature from the mathematical ones as we've been doing that some kind of physicalism is likely true. E.g. today we may not equate qualia with the physical, but we still think if I fixed all the numbers of physics that the mental experiences that would correspond to the brain state are predicted by those numbers. We may not think that those numbers are all there is to the physical or that they alone explain the emergence of qualia, as opposed to predict it.

This discussion got me reading a lot about mind and supervenience stuff. I discovered some interesting arguments potentially weakening physicalism. I would be curious to hear what you think of them.

The first says in a nutshell: there is a possible world w such that w is exactly identical to our world physically, yet contains non-physical entities in addition, say angels and spirits. In that world, angels and spirits clearly do not supervene on physical properties. How do you account for these "extras" in a physicalist model? — I'm sure this "problem of extras" is well-known and given your wide familiarity with current ontological debates, you're likely familiar with it. It seems to me that this arguments suggests that our world may be such that mental properties supervene on physical ones, yet could have been otherwise.

The second argument that struck me says (again in a nutshell): if mental properties supervene on physical ones, then there must be a law governing such supervenience. However, given that mental and physical properties are not identical in nonreductive physicalism, that law cannot be a purely physical law, but must be some kind of psychophysical law. But if it is a psychophysical law, and not a physical law, then what is left of of the remit of nonreductive physicalism?

I read some possible counters to these arguments, of course, but right now I'm just curious to hear your take on them.

 

[charlatan]

So I must say that in the absolute end, I am unable to rule out any of the positions entirely (going by arguments alone), but then again, I also can't rule out idealism or Brain-in-Vat-esque scenarios which I don't take too seriously. Either the idea that consciousness is either very misleading or an illusion, or neutral monism or some kind of dualism (some varieties of neutral monism get curiously close by allowing emergent levels to allowing some dualism).

In the end, I think we don't go with the brain-in-vat-hypothesis at least on some level of intuitive plausibility, not because it's fully possible to rule out....and kind of along those lines, I guess my strong suspicion is that there are very strong motivational factors for views that try to go towards orthodox physicalism, mainly things that go "oh dear lord, if I admit anything weird, I'm killing the scientific project". I'm very suspicious of these sorts of things -- just as string theory has fashion in science, and logical positivism had a fair bit of fashion in philosophy, it's worth being very nervous when there's a kind of orthodoxy in a field that's usually enormously contentious and full of what seems to be legitimate different answers that seem plausible enough.....

In the end, just as with the brain-in-vat thing, notwithstanding some physicalist arguments for a conservatism, I kind of take at default that pain, experiences, etc are things we need to take seriously and account for/explain, and that there seem to be certain facts that, while possibly accounted for physically, aren't accounted for by our physical science's present conceptions. That is, I'm not easily going to be persuaded into functionalism/behaviorism/anything of that flavor, mostly because I don't see any reason to doubt robust qualia than to doubt physical knowledge itself.
My intuition tends to be that, just as we seem to uncover mathematical knowledge in doing physics, and this isn't specific to the physical, similarly qualia may not be specific to the physical. It doesn't seem an accident that experiences so closely accompany brains. So the best I can guess is we're hitting higher level properties of the actual thing, and either we're mistaken about the nature of both/they bleed into each other via some more neutral thing.... or both are pretty transparent emergent things from another layer that isn't identical with either.


But to address your 2 points specifically:

For the first, the possibility of angels/demons is sufficient to rule out that mental properties are equivalent to physical ones, so that rules out some varieties of physicalism. Of course, it doesn't rule out physicalism of all types, as the minimal commitment is that all mental properties follow from physical properties in our world -- that means that the existence of all mental properties in our world follows from the existence of brains etc (which preserves the intuition one would want that scientifically controlled properties determine every property).

The key, though, is many physicalists wouldn't accept the possibility of angels or demons. I personally am inclined to be sympathetic to their possibility, but then the type of physicalism i take most to heart at the moment is the type that's only physicalism in a *technical*/logical sense, not in the 'spirit' -- in the spirit it shares more in spirit with property dualism or with a non-physicalist neutral monism.


For the second, I'd think of the mathematics analogy: the fact that the mathematical structure of the world could be counted as a non-physical property (you could imagine a world made of other stuff that isn't physical but had the identical mathematical structure, presumably).

I'm inclined to think this is not incompatible with physicalism because it seems reasonable that the properties of electrons, light, etc have a mathematical structural aspect, even if that aspect isn't identical to, only implied by, the physical aspect (due to not being specific enough, basically -- there could be other worlds with the same structure).

Similarly for the mental. I think the weaker view of physical => all other properties seems a better formulation of physicalism than one that requires the identity of all properties to physical ones.

Now, notice this doesn't mean I rule out that the identity view could be true of our world. However, I don't think one should require it to be that strong to formulate physicalism.

 

[charlatan]

I thought of a good analogy to illustrate why a neutral monist flavored version of physicalism isn't essentially to be construed as anti-physicalism. You can often find people aiming to casually extract spiritual implications from quantum mechanics claim that quantum mechanics has shown that the world isn't physical. That is, how the hell can someone used to e.g. Newtonian mechanics where there are good old balls and chairs that you can pick up and touch and see and so on actually take seriously that this abstract-seeming wavefunction is a physical entity?

Yet, today, I'd guess almost no scientist would take this point of view -- basically everyone would, I think rightly, agree that it's not that the wavefunction isn't physical, it's more like the physical is richer and weirder than we thought the physical is based on our sense that physical means real meaty stuff you can pick up.

The same applies to a neutral monist program -- it actually needn't be incompatible with physicalism, and perhaps the word 'neutral' is causing all the problems. Perhaps instead of thinking neutral-between-physical-and-mental one ought to think of it as neutral between the private and public point of view apparently intrinsic to (though further investigation may reveal the dichotomy breaks down -- which would only be more credit I think to the neutral POV) qualia and physical science respectively.

 

[Percival]

Hi everyone! In this new thread, I want to ask you the following question: what do you think is the nature of reality, and what do you think it reduces to? Are you more of a monist, commiting to the idea that reality is just one thing, like a substance or something else; a dualist, who thinks reality reduces to two things, like mind and matter; or a pluralist, who things reality divides perhaps into an absolute multiplicity of substances?

Are you a materalist? An idealist? A neutral monist? An open monist ( )? A physicalist? A pantheist? A panentheist? A panpsychist? A dualist of the terrestrial and spiritual? I want to know everything, so let's discuss!

Thanks for your contributions, friends ♥ And yes I expect @charlatan to be very active in this thread.

I'll come at this from a more intuitive approach. Many years ago I had a bit of an epiphany after spending years studying chemistry, biology, philosophy and religion and getting no closer to a position that felt satisfying. The epiphany came in the form of reading a translation of Plotinus. At first it seemed incomprehensible to me, then in a flash I realized that this was the inversion of the standard scientific western view of reality. Being was primary, consciousness emanates from being (rather than being an epiphenomenon of the material world), and what we experience as the material world is a further emanation where being peters out.

I see this as similar to the panpsychic view that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of "material" reality, but inverted again, where materiality is an aspect of consciousness. In time, this led me into Buddhist Abhidharma teachings, which is where I comfortably reside currently. To my mind, any cursory understanding of subatomic physics (which is all I'm capable of) blows apart a rigid distinction of mind and matter.

 

[Ren]

I'll come at this from a more intuitive approach. Many years ago I had a bit of an epiphany after spending years studying chemistry, biology, philosophy and religion and getting no closer to a position that felt satisfying. The epiphany came in the form of reading a translation of Plotinus. At first it seemed incomprehensible to me, then in a flash I realized that this was the inversion of the standard scientific western view of reality. Being was primary, consciousness emanates from being (rather than being an epiphenomenon of the material world), and what we experience as the material world is a further emanation where being peters out.

I see this as similar to the panpsychic view that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of "material" reality, but inverted again, where materiality is an aspect of consciousness. In time, this led me into Buddhist Abhidharma teachings, which is where I comfortably reside currently. To my mind, any cursory understanding of subatomic physics (which is all I'm capable of) blows apart a rigid distinction of mind and matter.

Fascinating stuff, thanks for sharing! Any chance you could detail for us a bit more what led you from Plotinian panpsychism-like ontology to Buddhist Abhidharma teaching? Getting to know more about the linkages between the two would be super interesting. My knowledge of Eastern philosophy is still quite scant, but I plan on exploring more of it in the future.

 

[Deleted member 16771]

if mental properties supervene on physical ones, then there must be a law governing such supervenience.

Deleted member 16771 is summoned. In third person, and in italics.

Seriously, though: emergence, case closed.


More seriously, I'm still swayed by interactionism since I read Popper's collaboration with Brian Somebloke The Self and Its Brain: An Argument for Interactionism years ago, and particularly the concept of 'downward causation' in relation to a 'mind' which emerges from a physical ground, and yet has a causal influence on the physical ground itself.

The parts create the whole, and the whole influences the parts.

This is true in a trivial sense, since our thinking can influence the physical world via our bodies, but the decisive factor for me - the empirical deciding line - of some kind of Interactionist dualism being more true than physicalism, is if there is any way that thinking alone can exert a causal influence upon the physical world ('downward causation').

If it can, as some interpretations of QM have it, then this for me implies a bidirectional causality and therefore dualism.

 

[Deleted member 16771]

Brian Somebloke

OK I checked. His real name is 'John C. Eccles'

 

[Ren]

I thought of a good analogy to illustrate why a neutral monist flavored version of physicalism isn't essentially to be construed as anti-physicalism. You can often find people aiming to casually extract spiritual implications from quantum mechanics claim that quantum mechanics has shown that the world isn't physical. That is, how the hell can someone used to e.g. Newtonian mechanics where there are good old balls and chairs that you can pick up and touch and see and so on actually take seriously that this abstract-seeming wavefunction is a physical entity?

Yet, today, I'd guess almost no scientist would take this point of view -- basically everyone would, I think rightly, agree that it's not that the wavefunction isn't physical, it's more like the physical is richer and weirder than we thought the physical is based on our sense that physical means real meaty stuff you can pick up.

The same applies to a neutral monist program -- it actually needn't be incompatible with physicalism, and perhaps the word 'neutral' is causing all the problems. Perhaps instead of thinking neutral-between-physical-and-mental one ought to think of it as neutral between the private and public point of view apparently intrinsic to (though further investigation may reveal the dichotomy breaks down -- which would only be more credit I think to the neutral POV) qualia and physical science respectively.

From what I read of your last few posts, I'm under the impression that you are sympathetic to a blend of nonreductive physicalism with property pluralism. Ontologically, there is the physical stuff whose full nature will be revealed by quantum physics, and it is itself neutral with regard to both current-physics properties and qualia that emerge from it. Is that more or less an accurate summary of your sympathies?

I would intuitively agree that the wavefunction suggests the need to expand one's understanding of the physical rather than some spiritual stuff. I think there is a temptation throughout the ages to conceive as spiritual whatever is yet to be exhaustively explained by science. Anyway, let's call this ultimate physical substratum U. Where do you locate mathematical properties -- within U or emerging from U? I've trouble thinking of mathematical properties as emergent, they seem very much basic. Or would they be part of the neutral properties of U, next to the other yet-to-be-discovered properties of U? I think that currently it's not entirely clear to me how many kinds of properties your ontology features; and which ones are basic and which aren't. But it seems to me, in any case, that the label neutral monism (especially monism) is indeed somewhat misleading here, given that you are willing to make room for property dualism at the very least.

I guess my issue is mainly that your ontology doesn't seem to be so parsimonious and relies on a leap of faith about the nature of U to an extent, though I understand very well why, of course.