OP, "For from the point of view of materialism all our thoughts are nothing but physical (chemical) structures and processes in our brains," Yes. Chemical processes follow regularities. The regularities of the chemical processes correspond to the regularities of our sense data.
Regular systems analyze regular systems. How is this supposed to be some sort of contradiction?
"From both points of view, our thoughts and beliefs are entirely determined by the physical structures and processes (that occur automatically according to physical laws) of the brain; so the force of the arguments has absolutely nothing to do with it." Non-sequitur.
Logic is a description of the regularities of material processes. A system that employs regularities to function determines if symbols are arranged according to certain rules or not.
An argument has force when its arrangement matches conventional patterns of relationships, and is invalid when it does not match those conventional patterns of relationships. This matching versus not matching is determined by a computational system that works, at base, from regular material processes.
Where is the contradiction?
"the idea that there are arguments – logically valid or invalid, more or less weighty – and that we can choose between theories by estimating the weightiness of the arguments pro and contra, is a pure illusion." This depends critically on the definition of the word "illusion".
If "illusion" means "anti-realistic" then Popper does not understand how the brain works.
If "illusion" means "abstracted image that corresponds to and tracks and is correlated to reality" then Popper is just plain wrong in his thesis.
Logic is a description of the regularities of material processes. A system that employs regularities to function determines if symbols are arranged according to certain rules or not.
If everything, including logic, is determined by physical processes that always automatically obey physical laws then there can be no errors in in anyone's or anything's logic or else they would violate those physical laws, right?
An argument has force when its arrangement matches conventional patterns of relationships, and is invalid when it does not match those conventional patterns of relationships.
What is a "conventional pattern" in physics? Gravity? Electomagnetism? The strong and weak nuclear forces? And what particles in motion do not match these "conventional" patterns?
"Logic is a description of the regularities of material processes."
It seems that logic would be more a reflection than a description. Be that as it may, whether logic describes or reflects "the regularities of material processes", given nomological materialism (since that is the context at issue), then anything which does not reflect (or describe - if that is the preferred term) "the regularities of material processes" would have to be illogical/illogic. However, the whole point of nomological materialism is that there are no actual irregularities, and anything which appears to be illogical would, in fact, be every bit as much a part of the processes of regularity which constitute nomological materialism as is anything which appears to be logical. This suggests that, given nomological materialism, there is no actual or functional distinction between the logical and the illogical - especially if nomological materialism entails epiphenomenalism.
StarduskyPsyche writes: "This depends critically on the definition of the word "illusion"."
No. Given a nomological materialism which entails epiphenomenalism, then choosing never actually occurs (and choosing is, hence, an illusion or an illogical notion or a semantic feint) for so long as nomological materialism entails determinism.
This still leaves the possibility of some materialism/physicalism/naturalism which does not assert entailed epiphenomenalism and/or determinism, but that would be a viewpoint which the citation does not address.
Michael, "This suggests that, given nomological materialism, there is no actual or functional distinction between the logical and the illogical" At base all is physics progressing as physics does, sure.
Logic is a convention, a language, an abstraction, an objective standard of reasoning.
When we abstract the notion of a negation we can then abstract a false statement, or a self contradictory statement such as: "This sentence is false."
None of this argues for non-materialism or shows some sort of self contradiction in materialism.
Victor has been quoting Haldane, Balfour, Lewis, and Popper trying to show some sort of self defeating aspect to materialism. There isn't any.
Every one of Victor's references are just shallow little quips that are either non-sequiturs or one dimensional childishly simplistic misunderstandings of how science works.
The use of index fossils is circular because they use rocks to date the fossils and then they us the fossils to date the rocks, right? That is the inane level of trying to show that materialism is circular or self defeating.
There is no argument from reason that rises above such inanity.
OP "In fact, all our opinions and thoughts are entirely products of automatic interactions of atoms and other microparticles of our brains according to physical laws. Physical structures and processes cannot be logically correct or incorrect, rationally weighty or weak." How absurd. I no longer respect Popper. Another case of a highly educated and respected man who writes childishly simplistic nonsense.
Microparticles in the brain are, or are not, arranged in a manner that corresponds to the true state of affairs in the actual cosmos. That is what the brain does, or fails to do.
Yes, of course, both accurate representations and inaccurate representations are all just made of "microparticles". It is childishly absurd to equate all such arrangements just because they are made of the same basic stuff.
Popper is saying that a castle and a pile of rocks is the same thing because they are both just made of rocks. Why would anybody consider this numbskull to be a great thinker?
One brain can have an abstracted image of the real environment stored in its brain structures and therefore be able to navigate the environment successfully. That structure is correct in that it is a fairly accurate representation of the actual state of affairs in the bit of the cosmos local to the organism.
Another brain can have structures that form a distorted or scrambled representation of the local environment. Those structures are incorrect in that they do not form an accurate representation of the actual states of affairs in the cosmos.
Both are brain structures made of "microparticles". One is functionally correct and the other is functionally incorrect. Duh.
There is no argument from reason that rises above the myopic description of materialism exemplified by Popper, pure inanity.
bmiller, "If everything, including logic, is determined by physical processes that always automatically obey physical laws then there can be no errors in in anyone's or anything's logic or else they would violate those physical laws, right?" Wrong. Logic is a language, a convention, an objective standard, like the rules of a card game.
However, unlike the rules of a card game, logic is defined to reflect observations of the cosmos, such as the law of non-contradiction, that reflects the observed fact that a thing does not simultaneously exist and not exist in the same place and in the same way.
A logical error occurs the same way one plays the wrong card, by convention, by definition. A difference between incorrect logic and incorrect card playing is that a subset of logic is designed to be representative of external reality so that a violation of logic within that subset of logic intended to be realistic then indicates an incorrect assessment of external reality.
The so-called "argument" from reason is just a simplistic way of ignoring the complexities of logic, the brain, physics, science, and what it means to reason at all.
Me: "If everything, including logic, is determined by physical processes that always automatically obey physical laws then there can be no errors in in anyone's or anything's logic or else they would violate those physical laws, right?"
You: Wrong. Logic is a language, a convention, an objective standard, like the rules of a card game.
So logical errors can violate physical laws? Which ones? Or is logic not based on physical laws and so there is something outside the laws of physics?
StardustyPsyche said: "At base all is physics progressing as physics does, sure. ... None of this argues for non-materialism or shows some sort of self contradiction in materialism ... some sort of self defeating aspect to materialism. There isn't any."
If in materialism there is no actual or functional distinction between logic and il-logic, and if both logic and il-logic are part of the processes of regularity which constitute materialism, and if that regularity in processing is physics progressing as physics does, then there is indeed a bit of a problem for the presented materialism. Is that problem surmountable?
If there is no distinction between logic and il-logic, then materialism (more precisely - an explication of materialism) has no coherent use for the term "logic". In itself, that is not an insurmountable problem inasmuch as no particular term/word is necessary to an explication; after all, for any and every word or expression, there are alternative words and expressions. That being said, if according to a presented materialism there is no distinction between logic and il-logic/logical and illogical, then there is at least an indication of semantic incoherence if and when that materialism is described as logical or is described in terms of processes that are logical or is put forth as derived logically. Still, materialism explications can eschew the term "logic" and its related terms insofar as materialism can be more aptly explicated in terms of regularity rather than logic.
However, there are other significant instances of at least semantic incoherence for which an explication of materialism should be on guard - if that explication of materialism is to avoid semantic incoherence (at least for as long as possible). For instance, there is the matter of choice/choosing/deciding - words which (especially in conjunction with the words free/freedom) express the phenomenological experience of there being an indeterminateness within (let us say macro- and not just quantum-) reality. A phenomenological experience (or its interpretation) is certainly insufficient to establish a fact of physics; there might or might not be the indeterminateness which seems to be experienced; however, nomological materialism asserts that there is no actual physical indeterminateness despite the phenomenological experience; nomological materialism asserts a thorough determinateness in which there are no actual physical alternatives (despite what logical imagination might ever conjure). Accordingly, any explication of nomological materialism is semantically incoherent if it includes or depends upon choice and the indeterminateness upon which it relies.
This relates to the Popper reference. Given nomological materialism (and the entailed determinism), it is sensible to question whether there is any point to argument. After all, does not argument presume the sort of indeterminateness upon which choice depends? And, if there is no such indeterminateness, can argument make a difference?
Here the materialist can present argument in terms of nomological necessity: (to be continued)
Here the materialist can present argument in terms of nomological necessity: the spoken word via sound waves, the written word via light waves (or Braille via touch) produce a subsequent physical effect. This is not to say that argument makes a difference, since, according to nomological materialism, there are no alternatives; there are no different options (certainly no non-imaginary different options), but this is also not to say that argument has no effect; argument always has a physical effect; it is just that nomological materialism does not cohere with phenomenological experience.
Indeed, nomological materialism typically dismisses phenomenological experience (for instance, by asserting epiphenomenalism); however, this has the effect of denying what many if not most would express as having the experience of being a person. Nomological materialism might well be coherently expressible in non-reductive terms such as "bodies" (rather than persons), but, ultimately, a coherent expression of that materialism would never include other phenomenological experience-based terms such as "value/values" or even "judgment", "responsibility", and "humane" as but a few examples.
None of this dispenses with or defeats materialism; however, these brief remarks do indicate matters which are to be taken into consideration in order to produce a maximally semantically coherent explication - even if the resultant semantically coherent explication of nomological materialism is impoverished (and painfully so) from the perspective of phenomenological experience.
For from the point of view of materialism all our thoughts are nothing but physical (chemical) structures and processes in our brains,....,our thoughts and beliefs are entirely determined by the physical structures and processes (that occur automatically according to physical laws) of the brain; so the force of the arguments has absolutely nothing to do with it. [my emphasis]
But why does this conclusion follow? His argument lacks a premise that rules out 'force of argument' having a physical correlate. If thoughts and beliefs can be allowed a physical determination why can't force of argument? 'Force' could be literal here, not merely metaphorical!
We return again and again to this point when discussing Lewis's argument and I have yet to see a convincing rebuttal.
Michael, "If in materialism there is no actual or functional distinction between logic and il-logic" There is a distinction.
A logical assertion matches a pattern.
An illogical assertion does not match that pattern.
Supposing I write 2 sentences on paper, say, with a pencil. "This sentence is false." "Truth is true."
Both sentences are represented by material, the paper and the bits of graphite stuck to the paper. The first sentence does not match patterns of conventional logic. The second sentence does match patterns of conventional logic.
There is no self-contradiction in materialism.
There is no argument from reason that rises above simplistic sophistry.
>Language can describe imagined entities that have no physical realization.
That right there is one of the biggest problems with materialism, as has been pointed out by multiple thinkers (including materialists themselves): intentionality (or "aboutness" or "representation").
You won't be able to explain "representation" in purely physical terms.
>His argument lacks a premise that rules out 'force of argument' having a physical correlate.
How would that work? A rational belief has to be caused by semantic content, not physical forces. But it always gets back to the old intentionality issue, which has never been remotely solved by materialists. How can a physical process have any semantic or representational content at all? What is the law from physical science (and only physical science) that says "when such and such particles are arranged thus, they represent X," with X being something other than the arrangement of particles themselves which may be abstract or not even exist. exist? E.g. constitutional law, or perpetual motion machines.
How do you describe a physical relationship between an arrangement of particles and a thing that doesn't exist?
Martin, "You won't be able to explain "representation" in purely physical terms." False.
The bit states in an image file represent the scene "viewed" by the camera.
There is a direct correlation between the physical object and the bit states.
That is what it means to be "about", that one thing correlates to another thing.
That is what it means to "represent", that one thing correlates to another thing.
When you look at something then your brain states correlate to the object you are looking at, hence your brain states are about that object and represent that object.
Pretty simple.
There are no defeaters to materialism.
There is no argument from reason that rises above simplistic sophistry.
Martin, "A rational belief has to be caused by semantic content, not physical forces." Incoherent.
Semantic content entails physical forces.
"But it always gets back to the old intentionality issue, which has never been remotely solved by materialists." Nonsense. Computers display intentionality. Intentionality is very easily explained mechanistically.
You are inventing supposed problems out of thin air because your analysis is so simplistic.
"What is the law from physical science (and only physical science) that says "when such and such particles are arranged thus, they represent X,"" The meaning of language is a convention. Pretty simple, what part of this don't you get?
"How do you describe a physical relationship between an arrangement of particles and a thing that doesn't exist?" By reversing the representational process.
Object X is transformed to representation Y. Y is about X. By performing the inverse transformation algorithm we can go from Y to X.
Suppose I start with representation Z, then perform the inverse transformation algorithm, only to find that no such object can actually exist.
That is how you imagine a unicorn.
There are no defeating self contradictions in materialism.
There is not argument from reason that is not quickly shown to be mere simplistic sophistry.
Language can describe imagined entities that have no physical realization.
If materialists hold that everything is a function of physics, then both logic and language must be a function of physics and obey the laws of physics. If you tell us logic is a language and languages can conjure things that don't physically exist it follows that physics itself must conjure things that don't physically exist. If physics creates non-physical entities via the laws of physics, which laws of physics and in what combination produce these immaterial entities? And BTW since physics is all there is, how would one even know about any non-physical entities since they would not be entities (that exist) at all but merely nothing?
A rational belief has to be caused by semantic content, not physical forces. Let's suppose a rational belief derives from other beliefs by the application of logical principles. If the beliefs are expressed in language then the logical principles are usually transformation rules mapping syntactic patterns involving logical constants like 'all', 'some', 'and', 'if...then...', etc, onto other syntactic patterns. A mind realised in neurons can surely do this just as digital computers can do proof-checking.
How can a physical process have any semantic or representational content at all? Through being causally contributory to the organism's behaviour towards an object.
What is the law from physical science (and only physical science) that says "when such and such particles are arranged thus, they represent X," There need be no such law. And probably cannot be.
How do you describe a physical relationship between an arrangement of particles and a thing that doesn't exist? If the arrangement of particles (a neural structure presumably) is causally contributory to behaviour we'd describe as 'looking for the thing', then said behaviour would never bring the organism into acquaintance with the thing. Perhaps it would get bored and seek some more productive activity and the representational structure might wither away.
bmiller, "If physics creates non-physical entities via the laws of physics," It doesn't.
"If you tell us logic is a language and languages can conjure things that don't physically exist it follows that physics itself must conjure things that don't physically exist." Simplistic sophistry.
Draw a picture of Superman. The picture is physically real. There is no living being, Superman.
All attempts on offer to show a self contradiction in materialism are simplistic sophistry.
How would one know that scribblings on paper represent some non-existent being? Physically, they are just pieces of graphite that appeared to unite with paper.
>The bit states in an image file represent the scene "viewed" by the camera.
I have on my computer an image of a unicorn. The image only "represents" unicorns because we humans say it does. It has no causal connection to unicorns at all, not least of which because unicorns don't exist. But even if they did, the image still has no physical relationship with them, and never did, and never will, yet still represents them. What is the physical relationship? Is it next to (non-existent) unicorns? Is it on top of unicorns? Is it attached to unicorns? Is there a chain of particles connecting the image to unicorns? What is the physical relationship between the image and unicorns?
Even worse, a representation can be of abstract concepts, and there can be no physical relationship between a group of particles and an abstract concept, as the latter has no physical existence.
This problem is hardwired into materialism, since materialists want to state that matter has no direction or teleology, and therefore cannot have meaning or purpose (aside from what we create). But then it cannot have representation, since that is a form of teleology.
As a materialist you want to have your teleology cake and eat it, too.
>Computers display intentionality.
Computers only have intentionality in a derivative sense. If I point at a triangular rock and say "that rock now represents the Eiffel Tower," then we can say rocks have intentionality in a sense, but only because I, from outside the system declare it so. The rock as self-contained system has no such intentionality at all. The same goes for abacuses. The beads themselves do not represent the 1s, the 10s, and so on. They only do because we point at them from outside and say they do. Same for computers. The problem for materialism is to get original intentionality out of a system that doesn't have it, and cannot have it according to materialists themselves!
>A mind realised in neurons can surely do this just as digital computers can do proof-checking.
But as I said above to SDP, computers only have derivative intentionality. The electrons in them only represent 1s and 0s because we say they do, from outside the system. They have no representation in themselves. It would be like pointing to a rope on the ground and saying "this rope represents the Amazon river." Does the rope really have representation itself? Like the neurons in our brains do? Or is it only because I point to it and declare it to have that?
>Through being causally contributory to the organism's behaviour towards an object.
But representation isn't just behavior. You can sit perfectly still and think about the planet Jupiter, and so the neurons in your head represent the planet Jupiter, even though you are not behaving in any sense.
>There need be no such law. And probably cannot be.
Exactly. Because materialists state there is no teleology or purpose, and since "representation" is a type of teleology or purpose, materialists paint themselves into a corner and will never be able to provide any physical description of how neurons can represent things. It isn't just me saying that. For example, here is professional philosopher (and materialist) William Lycan, in his article "Giving Dualism its Due," describing what he thinks is one of the biggest obstacles to materialism:
"For the record, I think intentionality is a much greater obstacle to materialism than is anything to do with consciousness, qualia, phenomenal character, subjectivity, etc. If intentionality itself is naturalized, those other things are pretty easily explicated in terms of it (Consciousness and Experience, op. cit.). But in my view, current psychosemantics is feeble: it treats only of concepts tied closely to the thinker’s physical environment; it addresses only thoughts and beliefs, and not more exotic propositional attitudes whose functions are not to be correct representations; and it does not apply to any thought that is even partly metaphorical."
“A rational belief has to be caused by semantic content, not physical forces.”
Given materialism - certainly a reductive, effectively nomological variety - there is only ubiquitously determinate physical process; all things and all occurrences are part of the ongoing physical process; all things and all occurrences are effects produced by an utterly deterministic physical process. Beliefs are effects of physical process and are thereby part of the ongoing physical process; this is to say that beliefs are necessarily caused by physical process and physical process alone. A relevant question at this point regards whether beliefs are not only effects but ever also causes or effectors.
Given materialism - certainly a reductive, effectively nomological variety - it is not beliefs which cause or effect; rather, it is the belief-effecting physical process which causes or effects what occurs subsequent to a belief having been effected. Accordingly, even allowing for the sake of argument that there is such a thing as semantic content, it should be apparent by this point that semantic content can only cause belief if semantic content is identical to belief-effecting physical process. Therefore, beliefs are effects of physical process.
Isn’t this sort of materialism strikingly consistent as presented?
How does it do it?
Well, it does it by a process of elimination. For instance, and probably most significantly, reductive effectively nomological materialism eliminates the phenomenological experience with which it cannot cohere except by denying its potency, and that is why this sort of materialism is such a barren desert.
It is a scientistic - not a scientific - philosophy. A scientific (best regarded in terms of a problem-solving) approach is of necessity concerned and engaged with the current limits within which it works, the current limits to what is known. A scientistic approach is constructed without concern for such limits and extends itself as if an actual theory of everything - one which assuredly holds even if it must ever acknowledge that there are gaps to be filled, details to be provided, or scientific errors to be corrected.
bmiller, "How would one know that scribblings on paper represent some non-existent being?" Intelligence. I guess I should probably avoid any further acerbic remarks wrt yours.
But as I said above to SDP, computers only have derivative intentionality. Forgive me, but I don't think intentionality is apropos. We were discussing the derivation of belief by the application of logical principles to existing beliefs. My point is that when the beliefs are expressed in language the application of logic becomes a syntactic business which we know can be done by machinery. The meanings of the non-logical terms in the sentences, or what they may or may not refer to, is irrelevant to the logic. This is why the idea of logical form works.
But representation isn't just behavior. I didn't say it was. I said representation makes a causal contribution to behaviour. The usual examples of so-called 'derived intentionality' exhibit no intentionality at all in my view. But an internal representation in an organism that causally directs its behaviour towards an object---think of a predator pursuing prey---is clearly intentional.
Because materialists state there is no teleology or purpose, and since "representation" is a type of teleology or purpose,... Do they? Is it? ...will never be able to provide... I don't see an argument here, I'm afraid. We might say a representation has a purpose, but is a purpose? Hmmm.
Lycan says that current psychosemantics is feeble. Fair enough. But something that is feebly F cannot be impossibly F. So an argument that purports to show that it is impossibly F must be faulty.
"it is not beliefs which cause or effect; rather, it is the belief-effecting physical process which causes or effects what occurs subsequent to a belief having been effected." False dichotomy. A belief is a physical process. To say "it's not the belief it's the process" is to say "it's not the process it's the process."
“False dichotomy. A belief is a physical process. To say "it's not the belief it's the process" is to say "it's not the process it's the process."”
Nope. No false dichotomy. Worse still is that there was no credible attempt to establish the alleged dichotomy. The term “belief” in the subject materialist context refers to an effect of the physical process. If the effect which is a belief is not a dead end, then it remains the physical process rather than the belief itself which further effects. The materialism at issue better avoids at least semantic incoherence when it refers back to the always determinate physical process that it has asserted; this is better for avoiding ambiguity or relying on other understandings regarding the characteristics or functions of beliefs.
Let’s try this another way: As previously stated, given the materialism at issue, a belief is an effect of a physical process. Not all physical effects are necessarily physical causes. Therefore, it is PERFECTLY sensible to say that the physical process effects some belief subsequent to the effecting of another - even a related - belief. By referring back to the physical process as effector rather than the belief as effector, one manages to avoid making it appear that there is mental potency which is other than the physical.
Martin: >The bit states in an image file represent the scene "viewed" by the camera.
"I have on my computer an image of a unicorn." That did not come from a camera viewing a real living being.
"But even if they did, the image still has no physical relationship with them" Incorrect, in the case a camera took a picture of a real live unicorn. In that case there would be a direct physical relationship between the object being viewed and the bit states in the image file.
"What is the physical relationship? Is it next to (non-existent) unicorns? " You are getting your directionality mixed up. When the camera views and object the physical relationship is that light is reflected off the object, then focused by the camera lens, then that excites the sensor pixels which transmit signals over wires to memory storage locations. Those are all physical processes that are designed to be deterministic, that is, by design, there is a deterministic physical transfer function from the actual object to the bit states in the image file.
You could call that transfer function and encoding function. Going the other way is a decoding function, which can project patterns of light from a monitor that are very close to the patterns of light that reflected from the original object.
There are no defeaters for materialism.
"there can be no physical relationship between a group of particles and an abstract concept" An abstract concept is a process of particles. If there are no particles in process then there can be no abstract concept.
There are no defeaters for materialism.
"materialists want to state that matter has no direction or teleology," You are confusing directionality again. Matter goes in the direction it goes based on interactions at the most fundamental level, whatever that turns out to be, nobody knows for sure. There is no end goal matter is attracted to, no final cause in any sense pulling matter toward it.
"Computers only have intentionality in a derivative sense." All intentionality is derivative.
"The problem for materialism is to get original intentionality" That comes from evolution over some 4 billion years starting with the first self replicating molecule. The amoeba intends to digest its prey when it envelopes it. The insect intends to ingest nectar when it lands on the flower. The beaver intends to build a dam when it chews on a tree. The lion intends to eat the gazelle when it chases the gazelle. The chimpanzee intends to eat bugs when it strips leaves from a stick. Homo erectus intended to butcher an animal when she picked up rocks to knap. Homo sapiens sapiens intends to do all that and much more.
All intentionality is derived by an accumulation of physical structures we can trace back to the first self replicating molecules.
There are no defeaters for materialism.
You will be much more successful in your quest to deepen your understanding of reality if you keep that basic fact in mind at all times.
To learn how the cosmos functions your most direct path is to stop looking for defeaters for materialism, you might just as well search for the fountain of youth or the holy grail. You are wasting your time in so doing, except to the extent you learn from your mistakes.
> a syntactic business which we know can be done by machinery
But intentionality is absolutely core to this, because machinery cannot do even syntax (much less semantics) without being able to first do intentionality. Machinery can do intentionality because we point at various components and say "this will represent OR" and "this will represent AND," and so forth. Without us assigning symbolic value to the components, it's just a bunch of particles moving back and forth, and no logic gate at all.
>representation makes a causal contribution to behaviour
Sure, but that's not all representation is, since you can have neurons in your head which has a specific meaning and which doesn't cause any behavior in you at all.
> We might say a representation has a purpose, but is a purpose?
The term "purpose" in talk of teleology is often misunderstood as "has a use for intelligent beings" or something like that. What teleology is is just a "pointing": a match points to "causing fire" in a way it does not point to "producing baby sea lions," even if that match never actually gets used. Representation is a type of pointing. The neurons in your head are pointing to Jupiter when you think about Jupiter. Since teleology is anathema to materialists, no materialist reduction of representation or aboutness is ever going to be possible.
>But something that is feebly F cannot be impossibly F.
My only point with Lycan was to show how even materialists agree that representation is a problem for materialists, and is not some off the cuff thing I'm just making up. Probably more directed at Stardustypsyche.
At the very least, the remark above is irrelevant. Beliefs are supposedly necessarily effects of an alleged ubiquitous determinate physical process; if not all effects (such as beliefs) are necessarily effectors, then it is wholly unresponsive - it is irrelevant - to start on about beliefs allegedly being non-static.
>That did not come from a camera viewing a real living being.
Correct, it's artwork. But the photo represents a unicorn. What is the physical relationship between the photo and the non-existent unicorn?
>You are getting your directionality mixed up. When the camera views and object the physical relationship is that light is reflected off the object
When the light is reflected off the non-existent unicorn?
>An abstract concept is a process of particles.
Oh? Pray tell, what type of physical process is "constitutional law"?
>There is no end goal matter is attracted to
Yeah, that's my point. Teleology is when something "points to" some end goal. Since representation is a kind of "pointing," representation is a species of teleology, which, as you remind us, you reject as a materialist.
>Homo erectus intended to butcher an animal when she picked up rocks to knap.
You are mixing up two unrelated concepts. To say someone intended to butcher an animal is a type of behavior. "Intentionality" in philosophy of mind is the quality of thoughts to be about things, whether you "intend" to do anything about those thoughts or not. Matter cannot represent things unless intelligent beings like us point to a lump of matter and proclaim that it does.
Intelligence. I guess I should probably avoid any further acerbic remarks wrt yours.
OK, I see you missed the point.
For materialists the only things that exist, exist physically or not at all. Non-existence is nothing. Nothing cannot be depicted in artwork since there is no substance or properties to depict.
So how can someone draw a picture of nothing and tell me it's a picture of Superman which implies it is a picture of something? And how would I recognize these scribblings as being a depiction of a Superman nothing as opposed to a Batman nothing since nothing has no distinguishing features.
Martin, But intentionality is absolutely core to this, because machinery cannot do even syntax (much less semantics) without being able to first do intentionality. I'm afraid I disagree. Perhaps it takes more than a blog comment to explain this, as the conventional view of 'derived intentionality', which I reject, is well established. I say a physical system is intentional in so far as it has internal representations of aspects of its environment which can (not necessarily do) causally determine how the system acts in the world, typically to preserve its existence. This rules out rocks, pictures, books, standalone computers, Searle's Chinese Room, etc. But a suitably programmed standalone computer can do the kind of symbol manipulation characteristic of logical inference without the slightest degree of intentionality in this sense.
Your explanation of teleology, if I have understood it, makes it a causal term. I don't see why a materialist need reject it. I note that intentionality is also often explained in terms of pointing, so there is scope here for confusion.
>I say a physical system is intentional in so far as it has internal representations of aspects of its environment
But see, you're not explaining "representation" physically. Since I'm using the term "intentionality" and "representation" as synonyms, you're saying here that "a system has representational abilities in so far as it has internal representations."
But how a physical system can "represent" anything at all is precisely the problem I'm raising. Matter is not "about" anything.
You should read Derek Barefoot's response to Richard Carrier's review of Professor Reppert's book (the book this blog is named after). He does a good job of pointing out how Carrier "invariably falls back on the very concept he is trying to explain. He stumbles into this trap again and again, despite Reppert’s specific warning about it in the book (CSLDI, 119)."
Martin, "even materialists agree that representation is a problem for materialists" I have no such problem. Perhaps other materialists are confused, or still stuck partly in their theistic upbringing, or some such mental impairment.
Martin, "What is the physical relationship between the photo and the non-existent unicorn?" The physical processes in the brain.
Light (a physical process) reflects off the photo, is focused by refraction onto the retina, streams of electrochemical signals go to the brain, you experience the image, you associate that set of brain states with other brain states to imagine a unicorn.
"Oh? Pray tell, what type of physical process is "constitutional law"?" A very great many brains that have a multitude of physical process related to constitutional law. There was no such thing as constitutional law before such brain process were going on and in the event all such brain processes cease there will no longer be any such thing as constitutional law.
There are no defeaters for materialism, none whatsoever. The reason is simple, materialism is the case.
All scenarios are reduceable to material processes.
bmiller, "So how can someone draw a picture of nothing and tell me it's a picture of Superman which implies it is a picture of something? All attempts at defeating materialism are simplistic sophistry, or complicated nonsense.
Yours tend to be simplistic sophistry.
When you look at a picture of Superman does it imply the existence of a real living being Superman for you? If it does, perhaps some of my acerbic comments about your intelligence would be warranted after all.
>Light (a physical process) reflects off the photo, is focused by refraction onto the retina, streams of electrochemical signals go to the brain, you experience the image, you associate that set of brain states with other brain states to imagine a unicorn.
No, that's a relationship between the photo and your brain. The photo represents a unicorn. So the thing you need to explain physically is the relationship between the photo and a unicorn.
Me: "So how can someone draw a picture of nothing and tell me it's a picture of Superman which implies it is a picture of something?
You: When you look at a picture of Superman does it imply the existence of a real living being Superman for you?
Once again you miss the point. I don't claim to be a materialist, but you do.
For a materialist if something does not physically exist, it does not exist at all. You claim Superman does not exist at all since he does not physically exist. If something does not exist it is nothing. Nothing cannot be depicted. So what do you think you are showing me a picture of?
If you claim you are showing me a picture of a non-physical (or non-existent) thing I will point out that for a materialist "non-physical thing" is a contradiction in terms. If it is "non-physical", for a materialist, it cannot be a "thing" at all. It is nothing and nothing cannot be depicted.
Martin, "The photo represents a unicorn. So the thing you need to explain physically is the relationship between the photo and a unicorn." There is no unicorn. I already explained how the photo relates to your imagination of a unicorn. That's all there is, your imagination of a unicorn.
People look at pictures and imagine things, what is supposed to be the problem?
>I already explained how the photo relates to your imagination of a unicorn.
Right, but then the photo is not a representation of a unicorn. It's a representation of someone's imagination of a unicorn. These are different things. And if we have one image of a unicorn and one image of someone's imagination of a unicorn, then there must be some physical reduction of the distinction between them. So what is it?
Hello Martin, If you are conflating representation and intentionality I'm not surprised you find my definition circular. To see the distinction consider an old analogue telephone system. I think it's fair to say that the current variation in the circuit represents (re-presents) the air pressure variation at the mouthpiece. But there is not one jot of intentionality here.
I looked at the Barefoot article. I agree with him that Carrier 'overreaches'. Carrier appears to be in thrall to late 20C computationalism, which leads him to say some silly things, such as the laws of logic are laws of physics, to pick one at random.
But still left open is your claim that machinery can perform syntax, with semantics left aside. I say this still requires "intentionality" because with materialism, there is literally no objective difference between, for example, the fermions and bosons in the air next to the machine and the fermions and bosons that compose the machine. It's just a single continuous sheet of fermions and bosons, with some areas more dense than others, and that's it. There can't even be syntax without some clearly defined rules that say "this clump of fermions and bosons over here is the subject" and "that clump of fermions and bosons over there is the verb" and so forth. And without us intelligent beings assigning values to certain clumps of fermions and bosons, they cannot have any such value or intentionality because there is no such physical property.
Karl Popper raises this same point in "Language and the Body Mind Problem," and although he's talking more about semantics, the point is similar to the one I made:
Consider a machine which, every time it sees a ginger cat, says 'Mike'. It represents, we may be tempted to say, a causal model of naming, or of the name-relation...
...it is naive to look at this chain of events as beginning with the appearance of Mike and ending with the enunciation 'Mike'.
It 'begins' (if at all) with a state of the machine prior to the appearance of Mike, a state in which the machine is, as it were, ready to respond to the appearance of Mike. It 'ends' (if at all) not with the enunciation of a word, since there is a state following this. (All this is true of the corresponding human response, if causally considered.) It is our interpretation which makes Mike and 'Mike' the extremes (or terms) of the causal chain, and not the 'objective' physical situation.
Martin, "there is literally no objective difference between, for example, the fermions and bosons in the air next to the machine and the fermions and bosons that compose the machine." Fallacy of composition.
By your assessment there is no difference between A few rocks. Thousands of rocks arranged pilewise. Thousands of rocks arranged castlewise.
Rocks are just rocks, right? Wrong. The difference is in the relationships between the rocks.
"There can't even be syntax without some clearly defined rules " Yes, and when you put together a trillion trillion trillion particles in certain arrangements then a convention of rules can be defined.
"And without us intelligent beings assigning values to certain clumps of fermions and bosons, they cannot have any such value or intentionality because there is no such physical property." Right, materialism is again shown to be the case.
"It is our interpretation which makes Mike and 'Mike' the extremes (or terms) of the causal chain, and not the 'objective' physical situation." We are part of the objective physical situation, how is any of this supposed to be some sort of problem for materialism?
There is no argument from reason, for god or against materialism, that rises above simplistic sophistry.
>Yes, and when you put together a trillion trillion trillion particles in certain arrangements then a convention of rules can be defined.
Right, that's what I said. You can point to a clump of fermions and bosons and assign it some symbolic value, such as "these represent the subject" and "those represent the verb" and then you can have your syntax machine. But that requires intelligent beings to do the assigning in the first place.
But as a materialist, you need to show how an arrangement of fermions and bosons can have a value such as "this represents the verb" without any external intelligence assigning that meaning to them.
Martin, you say, there is literally no objective difference between, for example, the fermions and bosons in the air next to the machine and the fermions and bosons that compose the machine. I agree. On the very small scale you are considering one bit of the world looks pretty much like every other bit. But I don't think that is relevant. What counts is how the world looks at the scale of the intentional beings or machines under consideration. And there are real patterns and regularities to be discerned at that scale, plus or minus a few orders of magnitude. Recognising these can be crucial to the continued existence of these beings.
You are right that there cannot be syntax without clearly defined rules identifying syntactical elements like words and punctuation and specifying the patterns in which they may occur. For certain regular artificial languages it's not difficult to program a computer to recognise sentences in the language and perform syntactical transformations on them. You will say, ah yes, but it has required human beings to impose certain 'valuations' on certain electric charge patterns in certain regions of semiconducting material. That's also true. For an isolated entity such as a computer there is nothing that makes any particular regions or their states salient. But what if the computer is embedded in some larger entity in which the results of its computations, ie, the states of its regions, determines how the entity behaves in the world? The valuations might cease to look arbitrarily imposed and start to look like what is needed for an entity to survive and prosper amidst the exigencies of the world. An organism with an embodied mind.
Martin, "But as a materialist, you need to show how an arrangement of fermions and bosons can have a value such as "this represents the verb" without any external intelligence assigning that meaning to them." Oh, is that all you want to know? That's easy.
All intentionality is derived from the entire set of organisms that have ever lived, starting with the first self replicating molecule, a finite number of organisms.
To gain some understanding how that worked you can look across the entire breadth of extant species, which are highly analogous to the depth of species that have evolved over the past 4 billion years.
What we now call aboutness, or representation, or intentionality evolved in tiny increments of development over about 4 billion years and the entirety of all organisms that have ever lived.
>what if the computer is embedded in some larger entity in which the results of its computations, ie, the states of its regions, determines how the entity behaves in the world?
But you are moving between two different things, here:
1. a system that is part of a larger entity causes that entity to move behave in certain ways 2. an arrangement of particles is "about" something other than itself
Now materialists have no problem with #1. That kind of relationship can be described in terms of physical relations: group of particles A is a part of larger group of particles B, and A can push against B to make B move around in various ways. Easy.
It's #2 that materialists cannot provide physical relationships for. If group of particles A is "about" group of particles B, then that means the relationship between A and B is _____. Fill in the blank.
You're describing origins. What I want is the relationship. If "arrangement of particles A" is of, for, or about "arrangement of particles B," then the relationship between A and B is ________. Fill in the blank, with only a physical relationship, of course.
If you think they are sophistry, then explain how they are so? I'm perplexed though how asking for someone to clarify their position amounts to sophistry.
If I think about a piano, something in my thought picks out a piano. If I talk about cigars, something in my speech refers to cigars. This feature of thoughts and words, whereby they pick out, refer to, or are about things, is intentionality. In a word, intentionality is aboutness.
Hi Martin, We started this discussion back at June 29, 2023 4:58 AM with my complaint that the writer Victor cites doesn't offer a good argument against a materialistic theory of reasoning. I have to make lots of assumptions: 1. a machine can have an internal representation of aspects of its environment which causally contributes to its behaviour, 2. the machine can linearise its representation into sentences in a symbolic language, 3. because logic turns out to be a syntactic and not semantic business it can apply logical transformations to these sentences, 4. the machine can translate new sentences back into new or modified bits of representation and thus alter its external behaviour. You have to see this as a thought experiment that constructs as it were a counter example to the Lewisian AFR. You have reasonably objected to aspects of this. But I haven't made any assumptions regarding 'aboutness', the machine's awareness or otherwise of the relation between its sentences or its internal states and the outside world, and so on. That's an independent issue and a much harder problem, I think. My limited aim here is to defang the AFR.
Ok, so I presume by "causal" you mean a physical cause, such as "exerts a gravitational pull on" or "is chained by particles to" or "is pushing against" etc.
So if "arrangement of particles A" is ink on paper in the form of UNICORN and "arrangement of particles B" is a horse with a single horn, then there is...a gravitational pull between the ink and the horse...? Or the ink is pushing against the horse..? Or something like that...?
>I haven't made any assumptions regarding 'aboutness'
But all of the assumptions you make in attempting to defang the argument from reason implicitly require aboutness in order to make any sense at all. There can't be any "representation" or "translating" or "symbolic" or "language" unless there is a situation in which "arrangement of particles A" is of, for, or about "arrangement of particles B."
Ed Feser has a chapter in his book "The Last Superstition" called "Aristotle's Revenge," wherein he shows how materialists are stuck having to choose, in regards to explaining the mind, between eliminative materialism and dualism, both of which are extremely undesirable. So most of them try to reconcile the mind and materialism by, implicitly and subconsciously, sneaking Aristotelian concepts back in. Such as final causes, formal causes, teleology, essentialism, act and potency, etc. And I would say that's precisely what you are doing. Which is fine! Feser would say that dumping Aristotle was the worst mistake of modern thought. BUT...recognize that that's what needs to happen if you want a "materialist" explanation of the mind. Or accept eliminative materialism. Or accept Cartesian dualism.
(None of this is to say you need to be a conservative Catholic like Feser in order to think his criticism of materialism is good).
Victor, A causes B means that A is about B? Really? To the extent one can say that A causes B then B is about A.
The wording of July 01, 2023 7:58 PM was mutual, that is, employed language indicating mutuality.
You (over) simplified that with the notion of one-way causality that seems to commit the fallacy of affirming the consequent. At base, all causality is mutual, but we tend to perceive certain situations as one-way, or unidirectional in causality.
What does the word "about" mean? Well, we can begin to get some indication of common understandings by reading the dictionary. Of course, there are limits to using a dictionary definition, but it can be a reasonable starting point at least.
regarding concerning with reference to referring to with regard to with respect to respecting relating to on touching on dealing with relevant to with relevance to connected with
So, yes, to the extent that it makes sense to say A caused B then B is "connected with" A B is "relating to" A
That's what "about" means, to have a relationship to, a correlation, a correspondence, a relevance to...
This quest to account for "aboutness" is a tempest in a teapot. There is no problem in materialism to account for "aboutness" because the definition of the word "about" is so simple.
If you wish to infuse the word "about" with some sort of mystical qualities then materialism has no way to account for those imaginary mystical qualities, because they don't exist, so why would any reasonable person feel obliged to account for them?
Sorry, Martin, I didn't quite follow your last comment. You seem to be saying that there is an 'aboutness' relation between symbolic or representational entities and worldly objects that is the province of mind and mind alone? Something along those lines?
Martin, "is ink on paper in the form of UNICORN and "arrangement of particles B" is a horse with a single horn, " There is no horse with a single horn to be connected with anything else, or about anything, or whatever.
Your messages have degenerated to confused garble.
One can write UNICORN on a paper. The physical process of reading those symbols contributes to physical thought processes in the reader. What is supposed to be the problem with that on materialism?
Not some strawman caricature of eliminative materialism.
As soon as you think you have found a defeater for materialism, that is your signal to start searching for your error, because there are no defeaters for materialism, none whatsoever.
Victor, "A causes B means that A is about B? Really?" To the extent that one says A caused B, and for every A there must necessarily be a resultant B, then one might say B is a signature of A. A common technical term for B as a signature of A is that B is an index of A.
A common example of index is the old saying "where there is smoke there is fire", smoke being an index of fire. Now, maybe what appears to be smoke is really some other sort of particulate cloud and not associated with fire at all, but then it isn't really smoke. If one defines smoke as a particulate cloud from a fire then whenever we see smoke it must be an index of fire, and if we discover there is no fire after all then we did not really see smoke, rather, we saw something that appeared humanly indistinguishable from smoke.
On that highly restrictive definition of smoke then we can say that smoke is "about" fire, meaning it is necessarily an index of fire, and that fire necessarily caused the smoke.
Now, you might say that is self defeating, because on eliminative materialism fire does not exist, only electrons and quarks and fields exist. Right. Fire is not an existent thing, it is a process of existent things.
A process does not have an independent existence, rather, real existent things do actually change and move.
So you've dug in your heels, and will accept nothing whatever that falsifies materialism. You're mind is made up, so there is no point in confusing you with the evidence. Such evidence is impossible, you say.
Reminds me of the atheist stereotype of religious believers.
>Your messages have degenerated to confused garble.
Yes, that's my point. You can't provide a physical account of how A can represent or be about or symbolize B, because in many cases B may not even exist, so there can literally be no physical relationship between A and B.
>OK, but...Not some strawman caricature of eliminative materialism.
Does the "OK" mean you agree that you are faced with those three choices?
Victor, "So you've dug in your heels, and will accept nothing whatever that falsifies materialism." Sure I would, but there is no such evidence on offer. You certainly have not provided any.
What do you suppose falsifies materialism?
"You're mind is made up, so there is no point in confusing you with the evidence." Based on a total lack of falsification of materialism on offer, a great many attempts to do so, and the failure of every such attempt I have ever encountered I am strongly personally convinced materialism is the case and that no true falsification of materialism will ever be offered.
That is, of course, inductive reasoning, so a reasonable person would hold such a personal conviction provisionally, that is, as a working conclusion that is, at least in principle, potentially subject to modification.
I mean, supposing I die and meet the monkey gods, and they are kind of mad I had not been worshiping them all my life, I will be, like, oh snaps, my bad, is it too late to offer you a banana?
"Such evidence is impossible, you say." Strawman. In never said that in principle I am absolutely certain that materialism must absolutely be the case.
I am convinced of materialism like I am convinced things will not start falling up tomorrow, and stepping on the next crack in the sidewalk will not result in me falling into an abyss, or any such thing. Those too are things I have become personally convinced of by inductive reasoning.
It would be nice to have more to go on than inductive reasoning but that is all I have in order to estimate the likelihood of future conditions.
"Reminds me of the atheist stereotype of religious believers." Right, you are stereotyping me, dint yo mama never tell you two wrongs dont make no right?
There is no argument from reason that rises above simplistic sophistry. Balfour, Haldane, Lewis, Plantinga, Reppert...not a sound argument to be found, none at all.
You have demonstrated repeatedly that you are incapable of making a sound argument from reason, incapable of citing a sound argument from reason in the literature, and incapable of falsifying materialism.
Now, I suppose things might start falling up tomorrow and you might provide a sound counter argument to materialism tomorrow but all evidence I have thus far indicates, nope, not gonna happen.
>The physical relationship is between the symbols and the thoughts
A symbol represents something. The question is how to explain the relationship between the symbol and what the symbol represents. Saying that the relationship is between the symbol and "thoughts" doesn't make any sense, since not all symbols represent thoughts. Some symbols represent, for example, the planet Jupiter. So you need to explain, in physical terms, the relationship between the symbol and the planet Jupiter, not the relationship between the symbol and "thoughts" since the linked symbol is not a symbol for thoughts, it's a symbol for Jupiter.
>You seem to be saying that there is an 'aboutness' relation between symbolic or representational entities and worldly objects that is the province of mind and mind alone? Something along those lines?
There may or may not be aboutness in things other than mind. The problem is that for any explanation of the mind in terms of "symbols" and "translations" and "information" and "corresponds to" implicitly involves aboutness, and aboutness, whether it exists in the mind alone or in the world, is not a property that materialism can explain. Materialism says everything can be explained in terms of fermions and bosons and their motions and interactions, the four forces, and that's basically it. So using only particles and forces, you cannot explain an "aboutness" relationship between two things because it is quite literally a non-physical relationship.
In bmiller's case I had become convinced that this sort of argument was mere trollish sophistry and not worth the time to respond to.
I merely asked you to explain your position while giving context for the reason I asked you to explain it since you apparently didn't understand the question. If I got something wrong, it should be easy enough to show me what I got wrong. Retreating in silence does not indicate confidence in one's position.
The debate today is no longer between materialism and theism/christianity (at least here in California). The debate is whether we are living in a simulation. The evidence seems to point toward living in some programmer’s game world with NPC’s randomly scattered around (Martin?). The world has moved beyond medieval debates into how we fit into the programmer’s simulation
Martin, "A symbol represents something." For the person making the symbol it represents thoughts of that individual.
" The question is how to explain the relationship between the symbol and what the symbol represents." I just did explain that. The physical process of thoughts-motor control-symbol making.
"Saying that the relationship is between the symbol and "thoughts" doesn't make any sense, since not all symbols represent thoughts." So, it makes no sense to state a universal truth? Really?
"So you need to explain, in physical terms, the relationship between the symbol and the planet Jupiter" That's easy. Light from Jupiter enters the eye, nerves are stimulated in the retina, corresponding thoughts are thought, more corresponding thoughts cause motor actions, the pencil moves on the paper in patterns that mean "Jupiter" to the observer of Jupiter.
How is any of this even slightly not obvious?
" the linked symbol is not a symbol for thoughts, it's a symbol for Jupiter." No, a symbol is for thoughts. The symbol means nothing about Jupiter to those without similar thoughts, say, an English only person who reads the Chinese equivalent of "Jupiter".
Martin, "Materialism says everything can be explained in terms of fermions and bosons and their motions and interactions, the four forces, and that's basically it." You left off arrangement, especially, vastly complex dynamic arrangements.
It seems you might be looking at materialism through a cardboard tube, or a microscope, or with blinkers on, can't see the forest for the trees, or whatever metaphor one might prefer.
Materialism has no need to explain some mystical grand notion of "aboutness", there is no such thing. We humans have feelings that one thing is about something else, and that is easily explained on materialism.
If you have some grand far reaching notions of "aboutness" that is up to you to explain, not materialism.
bmiller, "Retreating in silence does not indicate confidence in one's position." You can take it any way you wish.
A person might not respond for a number of reasons, Doesn't know the answer. Doesn't care about sharing the answer. Got busy on more interesting things. Thinks the question is too stupid to bother answering. Thinks the question is so stupid that only a dishonest person would ask it so it is not worth any time to answer.
Hello Martin. I'm not putting forward anything so grand as an explanation of mind or a theory of aboutness. I think a deflationary theory of aboutness can be extracted from my thought experiment but that argument is for another day. I think a machine such as I outline could be constructed with today's technology. If so, then we would seem to have a physical system that applies the laws of logic in governing how it behaves in its dealings with the world. And this would appear to repudiate the AFR as understood as showing that said ability goes beyond what is physically possible. If it's your intuition that such a machine could not be made then that is fine. We might probe a bit into your intuition, though. For example, you worry that my use of a term like 'symbol' necessarily involves semantic content, ie, aboutness. Symbol as in symbolism. But I claim my use is innocent of this. It's symbol as found in symbolic logic, the math-logic-compsci discipline. This is all part of my claim that logic is syntactical, not semantic, as I keep emphasising!
Victor, Here is one take on the best arguments against materialism. Dr.Robert C. Koons — "The Waning of Materialism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZLHKlwue20
Of course, your mileage may vary, but Koons cites: 1.Mysteries of quantum mechanics 2.The irreducibility of life, abiogenesis 3.Fine tuning of the universe for life 4.The hard problem of consciousness 5.Intentionality (aboutness) 6.Irreduceability of the normative dimension of thought
Thus, Koons continues the theistic tradition of painting himself into the ever shrinking corner of scientific ignorance. Wherever science has yet to provide a thorough explanatory theory, that is where god must reside.
Koons does not explain how some supposed immaterial stuff somehow accounts for all these things. Does he suppose there is a little angel nudging each particle along to resolve the specific value of the wave function? Did the finger of god jam together the first self replicating molecule? For each symbol on paper is there some sort of ghost that floats into our brain to whisper the symbol's aboutness to us?
How do all these mystical mechanisms function?
The complaint of Koons seems to be that we lack adequate scientific theories for these items to explain in detail the mechanisms by which these phenomena progress.
What is the theory that describes in detail how angels nudge particles in particular quantum directions? Can Koons write the detailed explanation of how spirits arise from symbols and intertwine with our brains to infuse us with a sense of aboutness regarding the symbols?
I have a simpler explanation, Koons is full of malarkey. He is just arm waving with vague speculations of some sort of spirit world wherever science has not formulated detailed theories.
Particularly cringy is Koons's list of references. Alvin Plantinga Thomas Nagel Antony Flew Michael Behe William Demski Stephen Meyer
The Discovery Institute? Seriously?
I have been looking, Victor, for anything resembling a sound argument against materialism, can't find one, not even one.
Dig my heels in? Against what? There are no sound arguments against materialism on offer, none at all. I have not dug my heels in, I am just standing here asking for some kind of actual argument against materialism. So far all I have heard is crickets.
Let me see if I've got your counter-argument right.
Here is the first part of the AFR.
1. Since everything in nature can be wholly explained in terms of nonrational causes, human reason (more precisely, the power of drawing conclusions based solely on the rational cause of logical insight) must have a source outside of nature.
2. If human reason came from non-reason it would lose all rational credentials and would cease to be reason.
3. So, human reason cannot come from non-reason (from 2).
Your counter-argument seems to be that humans can build computers/automatons which use logic and so since these automatons are physical systems that use logic, non-human physical systems can exist that operate using rational causes/logic.
I'm trying to understand how the counter-argument works. It seems the counter-argument implies that there exist in nature things that have rational causes (automatons) rather than everything having nonrational causes. So premise 1 is defeated by abandoning the assumption that "everything in nature can be wholly explained in terms of nonrational causes"?
>For the person making the symbol it represents thoughts of that individual.
It does not. A symbol represents an object, or a concept, etc. For example, a "stop sign" represents the concept of the need to stop. It does not represent the thoughts of a person.
>So, it makes no sense to state a universal truth? Really?
It's not a universal truth at all. In fact, it's completely false. Some symbols represent thoughts, sure. For example, the "thought balloon" used in comics is a symbol for thoughts. But some symbols do not, such as the aforementioned "stop sign" or the symbol for Jupiter.
>Light from Jupiter enters the eye, nerves are stimulated in the retina, corresponding thoughts are thought, more corresponding thoughts cause motor actions, the pencil moves on the paper in patterns that mean "Jupiter" to the observer of Jupiter.
First of all, this won't work because symbols can be about things that don't even exist, as I explained above. Light from unicorns enters the eye...?
Secondly, the symbol for Jupiter does not represent "thoughts about Jupiter." You could presumably create a symbol that does that, for example perhaps the symbol for Jupiter inside a thought bubble. Then you could say that that symbol represents "thoughts about Jupiter." But the symbol for Jupiter does not represent "thoughts about Jupiter," it represents "Jupiter," the planet. So as a materialist you need to show how there is a connection between the symbol for Jupiter and, not someone's thoughts about Jupiter, but the planet itself, as that's what the symbol "points to."
You cannot do so with materialism, because that would be a form of teleology, or purpose, or value, etc, which is anathema to you. You seem to recognize this when you later say "Materialism has no need to explain some mystical grand notion of 'aboutness', there is no such thing."
So you simultaneously are trying to explain aboutness (by confusedly connecting a symbol with thoughts instead of the object the symbol represents), AND are saying there is no such thing as aboutness. Which one is it? Can thoughts and symbols be about things or not? If not, then you are an eliminative materialist and you should embrace that and stop trying to work out some non-starter causal connection between thoughts or symbols and the things thoughts or symbols represent.
In short, the reason aboutness is a problem for materialism is not because of magic or God or angels, etc, but because materialism as a worldview rules such items out from the start.
>I think a machine such as I outline could be constructed with today's technology. If so, then we would seem to have a physical system that applies the laws of logic in governing how it behaves in its dealings with the world.
Not only would I agree, but I'd argue we already have plenty of robots, computers, AI, etc. I never argued that we cannot create physical machines that can behave certain ways depending on inputs from the world around them, and in fact have had those for a long time, for example a simple version would be a thermostat (the field of cybernetics created in the 1950s was in fact devoted to the study of this topic).
None of this gets you even in the same ballpark as the the topic the AFR (and it's related arguments) is getting at. The AFR is getting at "aboutness," as I explained above. That's really the key point of it. In order for a belief to be rationally inferred, it must have been caused by other thoughts that are about things. A thermostat is not about anything. It reacts to its environment, uses a simple "logic" as you stated in order to make adjustments, etc. But there isn't anything in the thermostat that represents something beyond itself, as a symbol or thought does.
Hi BM. The thought experiment is designed to convince you that (2) is false. That is, the fact that a conclusion is reached by physical means---mere syntactic juggling of symbols---does not imply that it does not rationally follow from the premises. If the syntactic juggling accords with a logical law then the move to the conclusion is rational. Movement in thought can be rational even if the underlying causation is physical. It just needs the right architecture of physical substructure. I guess this is to deny the idea of 'rational causation' as a distinct realm from the physical.
Hi Martin. See my reply to BM above. I don't think the AFR is concerned with aboutness. Reasoning concerns the 'shapes' of (sets of) sentences, relative to certain predetermined words---the logical connectives. What the non-logical words mean is irrelevant to logic, and this is actually what makes logic possible. I agree that a thermostat is not about anything. But neither does it 'use logic'. There is no manipulation of sentences going on inside. That's not to say we cannot describe its behaviour in if-then terms, ie, using the material implication connective.
>That is, the fact that a conclusion is reached by physical means---mere syntactic juggling of symbols
As I said above, in a world of just arrangements of fermions and bosons, there isn't even syntax. For there to be syntax, there needs to be (using the Wikipedia description):
"...rules used for constructing, or transforming the symbols and words of a language, as contrasted with the semantics of a language which is concerned with its meaning."
Rules, constructing, transforming, symbols, words, etc. You don't even have that much, in a world of just fermions and bosons. What you have are clumps of fermions and bosons and the spaces between them, and that's it.
As I said above, in a machine supposedly doing only syntax and not semantics, what or who determines where the boundary is between the fermions and bosons in the machine and the fermions and bosons in the air next to the machine? What or who determines which fermions and bosons are representative of "IF" and which fermions and bosons are representative of "THEN" and which fermions and bosons are representative of "P" and which fermions and bosons are representative of "Q" and so forth? Even if doing just syntax, and not semantics, some fermions and bosons still need to be about those things for it to even get that far.
What you have to do to make this make any sense at all is to say that some of the fermions and bosons work together in a system, and that system works to produce some specific result. But that is exactly Aristotelian philosophy, as I said above. Specifically, that's the concept of form/matter and teleology.
And that would, or should, be anathema to a materialist.
You said: The thought experiment is designed to convince you that (2) is false. That is, the fact that a conclusion is reached by physical means---mere syntactic juggling of symbols--- does not imply that it does not rationally follow from the premises. If the syntactic juggling accords with a logical law then the move to the conclusion is rational.
I agree that, from the external perspective of a person evaluating the behavior of the machine, its output is rationally coherent. However, you have pulled the ghost out of the material world in order to judge the material structure as rational, so to speak. Quoting Popper from the OP:
Materialists/epiphenomenalists believe that their position is rational, that is supported by rational argumentation that is weightier than argumentation of their opponents. However, if materialism/epiphenomenalism is true, this belief has no sense.
Here, Popper is saying that, within the framework of the machine itself, there is no "sense", by which he means a sense or judgement of the machine itself making sense, by which he means a semantic, not a syntactic judgement. That judgement is "intentional" in the technical (from Brentano) sense, and that machine you describe, like current large language models or the procedure in the Chinese room argument, would seem to many to lack that "sense."
Martin, Well, if materialism is the attitude of trying to understand the world in terms of what physics, chemistry, biology,..., etc, say, then I guess a materialist can accept all sorts of aggregated entities, especially if the theory of the more fundamental entities explains why the aggregations can occur. If that's enough to make me an Aristotelian then I'm happy to accept that label :-) Especially as I'd have thought that both Aristotelians and materialists would agree that machines can be built and programmed according to contemporary technological methods. But I don't really see how Aristotelian considerations enter into deciding whether such a machine as I envisage is possible.
William, I'm not really sure what you or Sepety or Popper mean by 'sense' in this context. If you mean that something like conscious perception is absent then I would have to agree with you. But pointing out that this is absent turns the argument away from one about physically realisable rationality towards one about physically realisable consciousness. Not surprisingly, I don't have an argument for the latter! But I do think I have an argument for the former.
That is, the fact that a conclusion is reached by physical means---mere syntactic juggling of symbols---does not imply that it does not rationally follow from the premises. If the syntactic juggling accords with a logical law then the move to the conclusion is rational.
Does F=ma count as a rational conclusion? It appears that I can read that equation out of the physical behavior of things. If that's the case, then it would appear that rationality is encoded in nature just like rationality is encoded in automatons.
There is a secondary intentionality (as per Searle et al) to a machine that works rationally. If I pen a rational argument, it is a page that is rational, so to speak, but only because the reader sees it as rational. The material thing that acts rationally by showing a rational kind of writing is indeed a "physically realizable rationality" as you put it, but only because the reader judges it to be rational.
Martin, " a "stop sign" represents the concept of the need to stop. It does not represent the thoughts of a person." A concept is a thought. You contradicted yourself in the space of just a couple sentences.
Absent thinkers thinking thoughts of stopping there would be no concept of stopping.
A stop sigh represents thoughts of stopping.
"the symbol for Jupiter." The symbol for Jupiter represents thoughts about Jupiter. Thoughts about Jupiter are causally connected to the planet Jupiter. The symbol for Jupiter has no association with the planet Jupiter in the absence of thinkers thinking thoughts about both the planet Jupiter and the symbol the thinker thinks is associated with the planet Jupiter.
"First of all, this won't work because symbols can be about things that don't even exist, as I explained above. Light from unicorns enters the eye...?" Symbols represent thoughts. Thoughts about unicorns are actual thoughts, so no problem.
You got the idea of unicorns from your sensory perceptions and modifications or re-arrangements in your thoughts.
You can look at a live human female. You can look at a live fish. Those thoughts are causally related to those external objects. Your thoughts can then imagine the female human torso connected to a fish tail. From those thoughts you can write the symbols MERMAID.
This is all super simple. What part of this is hard for you to understand?
>The symbol for Jupiter has no association with the planet Jupiter in the absence of thinkers thinking thoughts about both the planet Jupiter and the symbol
EXACTLY! That's exactly my point. A symbol cannot count as such unless some thinker associates the symbol with whatever the symbol represents.
And that's why materialism has trouble explaining the mind. Materialism wants to say that thoughts are encoded in neurons, not unlike how information is encoded in the words in a book. But nothing counts as a symbol in the first place unless some thinker makes the association between symbol and the represented object. So this theory presupposes mind in order to explain mind.
Martin, "So this theory presupposes mind in order to explain mind." No.
Materialistic scientific study has amassed vast evidence that there is no single you, no unitary self, no homogeneous mind.
You sometimes feel as though you are having a conversation with yourself because you have multiple parallel processes interacting with each other within your brain.
Brain states are stored as symbols in this part of the brain and analyzed in that part of the brain.
In a digital computer there is memory and there is a processor and those are very different sorts of devices.
Your assertion is analogous to "processing data presupposes a computer to explain a computer". No, a computer is made up of many parts that do different sorts of things all inside the single overall enclosure.
The brain is like that. It's enclosure is the skull.
BM, I guess it follows deductively from F=d/dt(mv), dv/dt=a, and m constant. But I imagine that you are thinking of inductive reasoning here, which I suppose is another kind of rationality, but even harder to formalise than deduction. You will have noticed that for the purpose of my argument I have had to focus down on a very narrow understanding of reasoning within an idealised language like predicate calculus. Actual human reasoning is very much 'looser' than this though it approximates it quite closely in mathematics, for example. The looseness means that mistakes creep in all too easily.
William, I appreciate that 'derived' or 'secondary' intentionality is a term of art in phil of mind. But I struggle to see what connection it has with primary intentionality. The former is portrayed as a static 'property' of inanimate objects and the latter a dynamic aspect of living beings, especially us. Primary and secondary rationality look parallel. My inclination is to steer well clear of the secondary conceptions as they cause a deal of confusion. For example, the only kinds of intentionality on offer seem to be (1) the derived kind, which gains its intentionality through an external mind with primary intentionality, or (2) a 'genuine' mind with primary intentionality which many claim cannot be physically realised, mainly because of the contrast with the dumb, derived intentionality. My view is that there is just one kind of intentionality and that it is physical. I say that what I have been calling 'symbols' have a dual role. They have a logical role as symbols in a language. But they can also play a causal role, by virtue of their physicality, in determining the behaviour of the entity which they are part of. In my hypothetical machine one might imagine a memory location that is part of a symbolic data structure which is also 'memory-mapped', as the jargon has it, to some input/output device. So 'logical' operations on the symbol can simultaneously be acts in the external world. It's through this connection that a symbol acquires semantics. When an embodied mind writes down an argument as marks on paper it is 'linearising' an internal symbolic structure onto an external physical medium which in itself lacks of course the resources to make sense of it. The effectiveness of writing an argument down as marks on paper is that another embodied mind, trained in the same language, can read it and have a very similar, if not identical, symbolic structure recreated within it, and thus benefit from it. The processes of writing and reading are themselves not rational in that they require no 'symbolic thought', though we can see that they have a role in promulgating rationality.
But I imagine that you are thinking of inductive reasoning here, which I suppose is another kind of rationality, but even harder to formalise than deduction.
Not really. I was thinking that if f=ma, and f=1 Newton and m=1kg then a = 1m/s². I suppose the same could be said for all the equations used in science. If that is so, then aren't all physical things that follow physical laws performing the "dual role" of your hypothetical machine? When objects follow the law of gravity, they are both causing movement and exhibiting the rational language embedded within that movement. We observe that motion and can "read" the language. In that case premise 1) of the AFR is defeated since there are no "non-rational" causes in nature.
Martin, "So this theory presupposes mind in order to explain mind." No.
Materialistic scientific study has amassed vast evidence that there is no single you, no unitary self, no homogeneous mind.
You sometimes feel as though you are having a conversation with yourself because you have multiple parallel processes interacting with each other within your brain.
Brain states are stored as symbols in this part of the brain and analyzed in that part of the brain.
In a digital computer there is memory and there are processors and those are very different sorts of devices.
Your assertion is analogous to "processing data presupposes a computer to explain a computer". No, a computer is made up of many parts that do different sorts of things all inside the single overall enclosure.
The brain is like that. It's enclosure is the skull.
BM. When objects follow the law of gravity, they are ... exhibiting the rational language embedded within that movement. I sing the body gravitational, as it were?
David: Yes, _derived_ intentionality is a better term than 'secondary.' Popper's statement can be re-stated then, as that, if we only allow basic physical laws about matter and energy to create our (accepted as possible, a material stuff-only based rational argument), we can only capture the syntactic content of our arguments, not the semantic content, and thus the derived intentionality based argument lacks 'sense' unless we re-introduce semantic content to that material-only content.
I'd like to explore the hypothetical machine and the "body gravitational" a little more. Let me see if I understand the theory correctly.
Let's say we observe a physical object interacting with its' surroundings and from this we construct a model of its' behavior based on our observations. We think of it as a machine.
The I/O of the machine receives stimuli from the external world that happens to map to an internal structure of the machine and so stimulates the machine to do something in reaction. The fact that the machine does something (predictible?) due to the stimuli indicates that the machine is acting in a rational manner. You and I can know this because we can see that what is happening is what happens when someone reads something written in a language that they understand.
Is there anything more to the model than this? It seems to me that I can model any physical object in this manner. Anything with mass will react in a certain way when it comes into contact with another massive object. Is the object demonstrating rationality then when it moves due to gravity? If not, why not? If it is demonstrating rationality like a language, then who is speaking to us?
Right there is what you can't do, as a materialist. A symbol is a type of "pointing" to some "goal," which is teleology, and you cannot have teleology in your worldview if you want to be a materialist. Your position is basically: "I do not accept teleology, now here is some teleology."
>Well, if materialism is the attitude of trying to understand the world in terms of what physics, chemistry, biology,..., etc, say,
It isn't. It's the attitude of trying to understand the world in terms of what physics says. Whatever biology and chemistry say can be swapped out with ONLY the language of physics, says the materialist.
>then I guess a materialist can accept all sorts of aggregated entities
Of course a materialist can accept aggregated entities. But Aristotelians go a step further by saying that it isn't just aggregation, but aggregation with characteristic interaction between those parts. What distinguishes a living thing from a non-living one is not just aggregated particles (a living person and a recently dead person may have the same aggregated particles), but the way those particles engage in dynamic interaction as a system. That "system" would be a formal cause, with the particles being a material cause. And the activities of that system would all be goal-directed, which would be teleology (final causes).
But materialism arose out of a rejection of formal and final causes, so you can't consistently maintain both.
BM. The fact that the machine does something (predictible?) due to the stimuli indicates that the machine is acting in a rational manner... Is there anything more to the model than this? Yes. Predictability isn't enough. If we can't look inside to see how it works we probably will adopt what Dennett calls the 'intentional stance' towards it. We see it as having objectives and making decisions and actions that achieve those objectives. If we can look inside we could search for evidence that it contained language like representations and applied the laws of logic to them in determining its acts.
What distinguishes a living thing from a non-living one is not just aggregated particles, ... but the way those particles engage in dynamic interaction as a system. That "system" would be a formal cause, with the particles being a material cause.
I'm sorry, Martin, but it's not clear to me what point you are making. That my proposal only makes sense within Aristotelian metaphysics, perhaps?
>it's not clear to me what point you are making. That my proposal only makes sense within Aristotelian metaphysics, perhaps?
Indeed, as I said above:
"What you have to do to make this make any sense at all is to say that some of the fermions and bosons work together in a system, and that system works to produce some specific result. But that is exactly Aristotelian philosophy, as I said above. Specifically, that's the concept of form/matter and teleology."
So it's not enough that an object behaves rationally we have to disassemble it to check if it's constructed in a way a computer scientist would recognize as doing logic? I think only things constructed by computer builders would qualify in that case. I certainly don't have any computer hardware and software inside of me.
Morning Martin. It's good to hear that my proposal is not incompatible with Aristotle. I hope it's not incompatible with contemporary physics too :-) Which discipline also has something to say about systems of particles, at various levels of size, though it seems to manage without invoking purposes.
Morning BM. Surely. You have a voice. I left that out of my machine for sake of simplicity. And to not get caught up in those unprofitable arguments about derived intentionality.
But even that does not depend on AND gates and run on a Linux OS. Absolutely. There may be many routes to rational beings. One way might be to build rationality in from the start. I'm not claiming that there are artificial rational beings. Just that I'm not convinced by the counter arguments that there necessarily cannot be any.
The hardware of a computer consists of AND gates (for the sake of argument). Are AND gates rational? Or do there have to be many AND gates. What if an AND gate naturally occurs? Is the naturally occurring AND gate a rational being?
That makes me think of an excellent question for the materialists here. What would a naturally occurring AND gate look like? Just hypothetically. And remember, it can't involve any intelligent being external to the system (such as yourself) declaring which part of it represents "1" and which part of it represents "0." It has to be self-contained in that regard.
No I'm not reading anything into your answers. I'm asking these questions because I don't fully understand your position and I'm trying to.
An AND gate takes in electrical voltage levels and treats them as symbols for True or False (or 1 and 0) and decides if the combined inputs amount to a True or False conclusion indicating its' decision with an output of True or False. It seems to be doing a logical/rational action. We know that it is doing a logical/rational action because we designed it to do this even though it cannot tell us so.
If it is doing rational actions, then why is it not a rational being?
OK. This is not easy. Here is a first shot. An analogy. Logic gates are to rational thought as junior school arithmetic is to high school proof. Gates operate on truth values, highs and lows, 1s and 0s, just as addition, subtraction, etc, operate on numbers. (Am thinking here of kids doing 'sums' with pencil on paper) Rational thought and proof operate on propositions. In both cases we search through a forest of propositions looking for a path that leads to a conclusion. Steps on the way to an end point. Perform the steps and the objective is achieved. Finding strategies for achieving ends, like finding a proof, is rarely a 'by rote' business. To think of a logic gate as rational is a category error.
For an AND gate if and only if A and B are both true the proposition is true otherwise it is false. It may be a simple proposition but it is a proposition none-the-less. Would a group of AND gates become rational if we added more gates in various arrangements to present a more complex proposition? This is sort of how I pictured your machine.
I'm afraid I can't see anything proposition-like (ie, sentence-like) about a single, isolated AND gate, even if the relation between its electrical inputs and output is what we call logical-AND (when it's powered up). Rationality is expressed in what something does. Man is a rational animal, not a humming box in an air conditioned room, no matter how many gates there are inside. Remember, according to my thesis, symbols acquire meaning by virtue of their causal effects on behaviour.
Rationality is expressed in what something does. Man is a rational animal, not a humming box in an air conditioned room, no matter how many gates there are inside. Remember, according to my thesis, symbols acquire meaning by virtue of their causal effects on behaviour.
You say that rationality must be expressed in a certain way or it is not considered rational? So for instance even though an AND gate changes its' output to True when both inputs are True, that is not considered a rational act. Its' behavior did change though didn't it? Do you mean that it must move itself around then? Like a robot? What if I just built a computer and simulated the input and output sensors with another computer so it would look to the first computer that it was moving around. Would it then be a rational machine since it would be doing the same thing that a robot was doing as far as it knew?
I guess that in the brain-in-a-vat experiment the deceived mind is still judged rational. It is rational enough relative to its simulated world. So I would say that the electronic brain-in-a-vat is also rational.
So it's not necessary for a rational being to move around. I mistakenly thought that may be an issue since you mentioned rational animals as opposed to a humming box. Then it must be the fact that the machine somehow cause symbols to become meaningful due to their causal effects.
So back to the AND gate then. Doesn't it take 2 input symbols and cause a meaningful effect? Lots of AND gates can take more input symbols cascade those outputs into more AND gates and come up with more complex and meaningful results can't they? I'm trying to figure out how your machine can work in principle.
So it's not necessary for a rational being to move around.
Hmmm. I think I want to say that it must interact with its world bidirectionally. It must have causal effects on its world and be causally affected by its world. The brain in a vat is doing this. It causally affects the simulation system and that causally affects it, though no real bodily motion is taking place in real space.
A single and-gate is hardly a subtle intelligence. It carves the world up into four states and acts one way on three of them and another way on the fourth. Might work for a bacterium: swim up when both photoreceptors are active else swim down. But more gates and more gate types surely makes for a more nuanced response to the world.
The materialist view is often dismissed because matter is said to support at best so-called derived intentionality. An external genuine mind such as ours is needed to impose its vision of where the material structure is 'pointing'. I reject this. I say that if a material structure---a suitable data structure in the digital machine, a neural structure in the human brain---is connected to sensors and actuators that interact with the external world, then it acquires genuine intentionality. It can bring the machine or person into acquaintance with some target object. What better 'pointing' is that? The AFR and other anti-materialistic arguments from derived intentionality are intuition pumps knocking down a straw man, in my view.
My kind of intentionality can reach out all the way as it were to the target object in a direct and understandable sense. The antimaterialist's intentionality merely says that there is some 'pointing' relationship between the mental world and the material world for which it offers no account.
Apologies for delayed response. Have been in limbo behind Great Firewall of China.
124 comments:
OP,
"For from the point of view of materialism all our thoughts are nothing but physical (chemical) structures and processes in our brains,"
Yes. Chemical processes follow regularities. The regularities of the chemical processes correspond to the regularities of our sense data.
Regular systems analyze regular systems. How is this supposed to be some sort of contradiction?
"From both points of view, our thoughts and beliefs are entirely determined by the physical structures and processes (that occur automatically according to physical laws) of the brain; so the force of the arguments has absolutely nothing to do with it."
Non-sequitur.
Logic is a description of the regularities of material processes. A system that employs regularities to function determines if symbols are arranged according to certain rules or not.
An argument has force when its arrangement matches conventional patterns of relationships, and is invalid when it does not match those conventional patterns of relationships. This matching versus not matching is determined by a computational system that works, at base, from regular material processes.
Where is the contradiction?
"the idea that there are arguments – logically valid or invalid, more or less weighty – and that we can choose between theories by estimating the weightiness of the arguments pro and contra, is a pure illusion."
This depends critically on the definition of the word "illusion".
If "illusion" means "anti-realistic" then Popper does not understand how the brain works.
If "illusion" means "abstracted image that corresponds to and tracks and is correlated to reality" then Popper is just plain wrong in his thesis.
Heads materialism wins, tails Popper loses.
Stardusty,
Logic is a description of the regularities of material processes. A system that employs regularities to function determines if symbols are arranged according to certain rules or not.
If everything, including logic, is determined by physical processes that always automatically obey physical laws then there can be no errors in in anyone's or anything's logic or else they would violate those physical laws, right?
An argument has force when its arrangement matches conventional patterns of relationships, and is invalid when it does not match those conventional patterns of relationships.
What is a "conventional pattern" in physics? Gravity? Electomagnetism? The strong and weak nuclear forces? And what particles in motion do not match these "conventional" patterns?
StarduskyPsyche writes:
"Logic is a description of the regularities of material processes."
It seems that logic would be more a reflection than a description. Be that as it may, whether logic describes or reflects "the regularities of material processes", given nomological materialism (since that is the context at issue), then anything which does not reflect (or describe - if that is the preferred term) "the regularities of material processes" would have to be illogical/illogic. However, the whole point of nomological materialism is that there are no actual irregularities, and anything which appears to be illogical would, in fact, be every bit as much a part of the processes of regularity which constitute nomological materialism as is anything which appears to be logical. This suggests that, given nomological materialism, there is no actual or functional distinction between the logical and the illogical - especially if nomological materialism entails epiphenomenalism.
StarduskyPsyche writes:
"This depends critically on the definition of the word "illusion"."
No. Given a nomological materialism which entails epiphenomenalism, then choosing never actually occurs (and choosing is, hence, an illusion or an illogical notion or a semantic feint) for so long as nomological materialism entails determinism.
This still leaves the possibility of some materialism/physicalism/naturalism which does not assert entailed epiphenomenalism and/or determinism, but that would be a viewpoint which the citation does not address.
Michael,
"This suggests that, given nomological materialism, there is no actual or functional distinction between the logical and the illogical"
At base all is physics progressing as physics does, sure.
Logic is a convention, a language, an abstraction, an objective standard of reasoning.
When we abstract the notion of a negation we can then abstract a false statement, or a self contradictory statement such as: "This sentence is false."
None of this argues for non-materialism or shows some sort of self contradiction in materialism.
Victor has been quoting Haldane, Balfour, Lewis, and Popper trying to show some sort of self defeating aspect to materialism. There isn't any.
Every one of Victor's references are just shallow little quips that are either non-sequiturs or one dimensional childishly simplistic misunderstandings of how science works.
The use of index fossils is circular because they use rocks to date the fossils and then they us the fossils to date the rocks, right? That is the inane level of trying to show that materialism is circular or self defeating.
There is no argument from reason that rises above such inanity.
OP
"In fact, all our opinions and thoughts are entirely products of automatic interactions of atoms and other microparticles of our brains according to physical laws. Physical structures and processes cannot be logically correct or incorrect, rationally weighty or weak."
How absurd. I no longer respect Popper. Another case of a highly educated and respected man who writes childishly simplistic nonsense.
Microparticles in the brain are, or are not, arranged in a manner that corresponds to the true state of affairs in the actual cosmos. That is what the brain does, or fails to do.
Yes, of course, both accurate representations and inaccurate representations are all just made of "microparticles". It is childishly absurd to equate all such arrangements just because they are made of the same basic stuff.
Popper is saying that a castle and a pile of rocks is the same thing because they are both just made of rocks. Why would anybody consider this numbskull to be a great thinker?
One brain can have an abstracted image of the real environment stored in its brain structures and therefore be able to navigate the environment successfully. That structure is correct in that it is a fairly accurate representation of the actual state of affairs in the bit of the cosmos local to the organism.
Another brain can have structures that form a distorted or scrambled representation of the local environment. Those structures are incorrect in that they do not form an accurate representation of the actual states of affairs in the cosmos.
Both are brain structures made of "microparticles". One is functionally correct and the other is functionally incorrect. Duh.
There is no argument from reason that rises above the myopic description of materialism exemplified by Popper, pure inanity.
bmiller,
"If everything, including logic, is determined by physical processes that always automatically obey physical laws then there can be no errors in in anyone's or anything's logic or else they would violate those physical laws, right?"
Wrong. Logic is a language, a convention, an objective standard, like the rules of a card game.
However, unlike the rules of a card game, logic is defined to reflect observations of the cosmos, such as the law of non-contradiction, that reflects the observed fact that a thing does not simultaneously exist and not exist in the same place and in the same way.
A logical error occurs the same way one plays the wrong card, by convention, by definition. A difference between incorrect logic and incorrect card playing is that a subset of logic is designed to be representative of external reality so that a violation of logic within that subset of logic intended to be realistic then indicates an incorrect assessment of external reality.
The so-called "argument" from reason is just a simplistic way of ignoring the complexities of logic, the brain, physics, science, and what it means to reason at all.
Me:
"If everything, including logic, is determined by physical processes that always automatically obey physical laws then there can be no errors in in anyone's or anything's logic or else they would violate those physical laws, right?"
You:
Wrong. Logic is a language, a convention, an objective standard, like the rules of a card game.
So logical errors can violate physical laws? Which ones? Or is logic not based on physical laws and so there is something outside the laws of physics?
StardustyPsyche said:
"At base all is physics progressing as physics does, sure. ... None of this argues for non-materialism or shows some sort of self contradiction in materialism ... some sort of self defeating aspect to materialism. There isn't any."
If in materialism there is no actual or functional distinction between logic and il-logic, and if both logic and il-logic are part of the processes of regularity which constitute materialism, and if that regularity in processing is physics progressing as physics does, then there is indeed a bit of a problem for the presented materialism. Is that problem surmountable?
If there is no distinction between logic and il-logic, then materialism (more precisely - an explication of materialism) has no coherent use for the term "logic". In itself, that is not an insurmountable problem inasmuch as no particular term/word is necessary to an explication; after all, for any and every word or expression, there are alternative words and expressions. That being said, if according to a presented materialism there is no distinction between logic and il-logic/logical and illogical, then there is at least an indication of semantic incoherence if and when that materialism is described as logical or is described in terms of processes that are logical or is put forth as derived logically. Still, materialism explications can eschew the term "logic" and its related terms insofar as materialism can be more aptly explicated in terms of regularity rather than logic.
However, there are other significant instances of at least semantic incoherence for which an explication of materialism should be on guard - if that explication of materialism is to avoid semantic incoherence (at least for as long as possible). For instance, there is the matter of choice/choosing/deciding - words which (especially in conjunction with the words free/freedom) express the phenomenological experience of there being an indeterminateness within (let us say macro- and not just quantum-) reality. A phenomenological experience (or its interpretation) is certainly insufficient to establish a fact of physics; there might or might not be the indeterminateness which seems to be experienced; however, nomological materialism asserts that there is no actual physical indeterminateness despite the phenomenological experience; nomological materialism asserts a thorough determinateness in which there are no actual physical alternatives (despite what logical imagination might ever conjure). Accordingly, any explication of nomological materialism is semantically incoherent if it includes or depends upon choice and the indeterminateness upon which it relies.
This relates to the Popper reference. Given nomological materialism (and the entailed determinism), it is sensible to question whether there is any point to argument. After all, does not argument presume the sort of indeterminateness upon which choice depends? And, if there is no such indeterminateness, can argument make a difference?
Here the materialist can present argument in terms of nomological necessity: (to be continued)
(Continuing)
Here the materialist can present argument in terms of nomological necessity: the spoken word via sound waves, the written word via light waves (or Braille via touch) produce a subsequent physical effect. This is not to say that argument makes a difference, since, according to nomological materialism, there are no alternatives; there are no different options (certainly no non-imaginary different options), but this is also not to say that argument has no effect; argument always has a physical effect; it is just that nomological materialism does not cohere with phenomenological experience.
Indeed, nomological materialism typically dismisses phenomenological experience (for instance, by asserting epiphenomenalism); however, this has the effect of denying what many if not most would express as having the experience of being a person. Nomological materialism might well be coherently expressible in non-reductive terms such as "bodies" (rather than persons), but, ultimately, a coherent expression of that materialism would never include other phenomenological experience-based terms such as "value/values" or even "judgment", "responsibility", and "humane" as but a few examples.
None of this dispenses with or defeats materialism; however, these brief remarks do indicate matters which are to be taken into consideration in order to produce a maximally semantically coherent explication - even if the resultant semantically coherent explication of nomological materialism is impoverished (and painfully so) from the perspective of phenomenological experience.
The writer says,
For from the point of view of materialism all our thoughts are nothing but physical (chemical) structures and processes in our brains,....,our thoughts and beliefs are entirely determined by the physical structures and processes (that occur automatically according to physical laws) of the brain; so the force of the arguments has absolutely nothing to do with it. [my emphasis]
But why does this conclusion follow? His argument lacks a premise that rules out 'force of argument' having a physical correlate. If thoughts and beliefs can be allowed a physical determination why can't force of argument? 'Force' could be literal here, not merely metaphorical!
We return again and again to this point when discussing Lewis's argument and I have yet to see a convincing rebuttal.
bmiller,
"So logical errors can violate physical laws?"
Physics can be described by logic.
Logic is a language.
Language can describe imagined entities that have no physical realization.
No self contradiction.
Michael,
"If in materialism there is no actual or functional distinction between logic and il-logic"
There is a distinction.
A logical assertion matches a pattern.
An illogical assertion does not match that pattern.
Supposing I write 2 sentences on paper, say, with a pencil.
"This sentence is false."
"Truth is true."
Both sentences are represented by material, the paper and the bits of graphite stuck to the paper.
The first sentence does not match patterns of conventional logic.
The second sentence does match patterns of conventional logic.
There is no self-contradiction in materialism.
There is no argument from reason that rises above simplistic sophistry.
Stardustypsyche
>Language can describe imagined entities that have no physical realization.
That right there is one of the biggest problems with materialism, as has been pointed out by multiple thinkers (including materialists themselves): intentionality (or "aboutness" or "representation").
You won't be able to explain "representation" in purely physical terms.
David Brightly,
>His argument lacks a premise that rules out 'force of argument' having a physical correlate.
How would that work? A rational belief has to be caused by semantic content, not physical forces. But it always gets back to the old intentionality issue, which has never been remotely solved by materialists. How can a physical process have any semantic or representational content at all? What is the law from physical science (and only physical science) that says "when such and such particles are arranged thus, they represent X," with X being something other than the arrangement of particles themselves which may be abstract or not even exist. exist? E.g. constitutional law, or perpetual motion machines.
How do you describe a physical relationship between an arrangement of particles and a thing that doesn't exist?
Martin,
"You won't be able to explain "representation" in purely physical terms."
False.
The bit states in an image file represent the scene "viewed" by the camera.
There is a direct correlation between the physical object and the bit states.
That is what it means to be "about", that one thing correlates to another thing.
That is what it means to "represent", that one thing correlates to another thing.
When you look at something then your brain states correlate to the object you are looking at, hence your brain states are about that object and represent that object.
Pretty simple.
There are no defeaters to materialism.
There is no argument from reason that rises above simplistic sophistry.
Martin,
"A rational belief has to be caused by semantic content, not physical forces."
Incoherent.
Semantic content entails physical forces.
"But it always gets back to the old intentionality issue, which has never been remotely solved by materialists."
Nonsense. Computers display intentionality. Intentionality is very easily explained mechanistically.
You are inventing supposed problems out of thin air because your analysis is so simplistic.
"What is the law from physical science (and only physical science) that says "when such and such particles are arranged thus, they represent X,""
The meaning of language is a convention. Pretty simple, what part of this don't you get?
"How do you describe a physical relationship between an arrangement of particles and a thing that doesn't exist?"
By reversing the representational process.
Object X is transformed to representation Y. Y is about X. By performing the inverse transformation algorithm we can go from Y to X.
Suppose I start with representation Z, then perform the inverse transformation algorithm, only to find that no such object can actually exist.
That is how you imagine a unicorn.
There are no defeating self contradictions in materialism.
There is not argument from reason that is not quickly shown to be mere simplistic sophistry.
Stardusty,
Physics can be described by logic.
Logic is a language.
Language can describe imagined entities that have no physical realization.
If materialists hold that everything is a function of physics, then both logic and language must be a function of physics and obey the laws of physics. If you tell us logic is a language and languages can conjure things that don't physically exist it follows that physics itself must conjure things that don't physically exist. If physics creates non-physical entities via the laws of physics, which laws of physics and in what combination produce these immaterial entities? And BTW since physics is all there is, how would one even know about any non-physical entities since they would not be entities (that exist) at all but merely nothing?
Hello Martin. Some responses.
A rational belief has to be caused by semantic content, not physical forces. Let's suppose a rational belief derives from other beliefs by the application of logical principles. If the beliefs are expressed in language then the logical principles are usually transformation rules mapping syntactic patterns involving logical constants like 'all', 'some', 'and', 'if...then...', etc, onto other syntactic patterns. A mind realised in neurons can surely do this just as digital computers can do proof-checking.
How can a physical process have any semantic or representational content at all? Through being causally contributory to the organism's behaviour towards an object.
What is the law from physical science (and only physical science) that says "when such and such particles are arranged thus, they represent X," There need be no such law. And probably cannot be.
How do you describe a physical relationship between an arrangement of particles and a thing that doesn't exist? If the arrangement of particles (a neural structure presumably) is causally contributory to behaviour we'd describe as 'looking for the thing', then said behaviour would never bring the organism into acquaintance with the thing. Perhaps it would get bored and seek some more productive activity and the representational structure might wither away.
bmiller,
"If physics creates non-physical entities via the laws of physics,"
It doesn't.
"If you tell us logic is a language and languages can conjure things that don't physically exist it follows that physics itself must conjure things that don't physically exist."
Simplistic sophistry.
Draw a picture of Superman. The picture is physically real. There is no living being, Superman.
All attempts on offer to show a self contradiction in materialism are simplistic sophistry.
How would one know that scribblings on paper represent some non-existent being? Physically, they are just pieces of graphite that appeared to unite with paper.
SDP,
>The bit states in an image file represent the scene "viewed" by the camera.
I have on my computer an image of a unicorn. The image only "represents" unicorns because we humans say it does. It has no causal connection to unicorns at all, not least of which because unicorns don't exist. But even if they did, the image still has no physical relationship with them, and never did, and never will, yet still represents them. What is the physical relationship? Is it next to (non-existent) unicorns? Is it on top of unicorns? Is it attached to unicorns? Is there a chain of particles connecting the image to unicorns? What is the physical relationship between the image and unicorns?
Even worse, a representation can be of abstract concepts, and there can be no physical relationship between a group of particles and an abstract concept, as the latter has no physical existence.
This problem is hardwired into materialism, since materialists want to state that matter has no direction or teleology, and therefore cannot have meaning or purpose (aside from what we create). But then it cannot have representation, since that is a form of teleology.
As a materialist you want to have your teleology cake and eat it, too.
>Computers display intentionality.
Computers only have intentionality in a derivative sense. If I point at a triangular rock and say "that rock now represents the Eiffel Tower," then we can say rocks have intentionality in a sense, but only because I, from outside the system declare it so. The rock as self-contained system has no such intentionality at all. The same goes for abacuses. The beads themselves do not represent the 1s, the 10s, and so on. They only do because we point at them from outside and say they do. Same for computers. The problem for materialism is to get original intentionality out of a system that doesn't have it, and cannot have it according to materialists themselves!
David Brightly,
>A mind realised in neurons can surely do this just as digital computers can do proof-checking.
But as I said above to SDP, computers only have derivative intentionality. The electrons in them only represent 1s and 0s because we say they do, from outside the system. They have no representation in themselves. It would be like pointing to a rope on the ground and saying "this rope represents the Amazon river." Does the rope really have representation itself? Like the neurons in our brains do? Or is it only because I point to it and declare it to have that?
>Through being causally contributory to the organism's behaviour towards an object.
But representation isn't just behavior. You can sit perfectly still and think about the planet Jupiter, and so the neurons in your head represent the planet Jupiter, even though you are not behaving in any sense.
>There need be no such law. And probably cannot be.
Exactly. Because materialists state there is no teleology or purpose, and since "representation" is a type of teleology or purpose, materialists paint themselves into a corner and will never be able to provide any physical description of how neurons can represent things. It isn't just me saying that. For example, here is professional philosopher (and materialist) William Lycan, in his article "Giving Dualism its Due," describing what he thinks is one of the biggest obstacles to materialism:
"For the record, I think intentionality is a much greater obstacle to materialism than is anything to do with consciousness, qualia, phenomenal character, subjectivity, etc. If intentionality itself is naturalized, those other things are pretty easily explicated in terms of it (Consciousness and Experience, op. cit.). But in my view, current psychosemantics is feeble: it treats only of concepts tied closely to the thinker’s physical environment; it addresses only thoughts and beliefs, and not more exotic propositional attitudes whose functions are not to be correct representations; and it does not apply to any thought that is even partly metaphorical."
Martin said:
“A rational belief has to be caused by semantic content, not physical forces.”
Given materialism - certainly a reductive, effectively nomological variety - there is only ubiquitously determinate physical process; all things and all occurrences are part of the ongoing physical process; all things and all occurrences are effects produced by an utterly deterministic physical process. Beliefs are effects of physical process and are thereby part of the ongoing physical process; this is to say that beliefs are necessarily caused by physical process and physical process alone. A relevant question at this point regards whether beliefs are not only effects but ever also causes or effectors.
Given materialism - certainly a reductive, effectively nomological variety - it is not beliefs which cause or effect; rather, it is the belief-effecting physical process which causes or effects what occurs subsequent to a belief having been effected. Accordingly, even allowing for the sake of argument that there is such a thing as semantic content, it should be apparent by this point that semantic content can only cause belief if semantic content is identical to belief-effecting physical process. Therefore, beliefs are effects of physical process.
Isn’t this sort of materialism strikingly consistent as presented?
How does it do it?
Well, it does it by a process of elimination. For instance, and probably most significantly, reductive effectively nomological materialism eliminates the phenomenological experience with which it cannot cohere except by denying its potency, and that is why this sort of materialism is such a barren desert.
It is a scientistic - not a scientific - philosophy. A scientific (best regarded in terms of a problem-solving) approach is of necessity concerned and engaged with the current limits within which it works, the current limits to what is known. A scientistic approach is constructed without concern for such limits and extends itself as if an actual theory of everything - one which assuredly holds even if it must ever acknowledge that there are gaps to be filled, details to be provided, or scientific errors to be corrected.
bmiller,
"How would one know that scribblings on paper represent some non-existent being?"
Intelligence. I guess I should probably avoid any further acerbic remarks wrt yours.
Hello Martin. Some more replies.
But as I said above to SDP, computers only have derivative intentionality. Forgive me, but I don't think intentionality is apropos. We were discussing the derivation of belief by the application of logical principles to existing beliefs. My point is that when the beliefs are expressed in language the application of logic becomes a syntactic business which we know can be done by machinery. The meanings of the non-logical terms in the sentences, or what they may or may not refer to, is irrelevant to the logic. This is why the idea of logical form works.
But representation isn't just behavior. I didn't say it was. I said representation makes a causal contribution to behaviour. The usual examples of so-called 'derived intentionality' exhibit no intentionality at all in my view. But an internal representation in an organism that causally directs its behaviour towards an object---think of a predator pursuing prey---is clearly intentional.
Because materialists state there is no teleology or purpose, and since "representation" is a type of teleology or purpose,... Do they? Is it? ...will never be able to provide... I don't see an argument here, I'm afraid. We might say a representation has a purpose, but is a purpose? Hmmm.
Lycan says that current psychosemantics is feeble. Fair enough. But something that is feebly F cannot be impossibly F. So an argument that purports to show that it is impossibly F must be faulty.
"it is not beliefs which cause or effect; rather, it is the belief-effecting physical process which causes or effects what occurs subsequent to a belief having been effected."
False dichotomy. A belief is a physical process. To say "it's not the belief it's the process" is to say "it's not the process it's the process."
Makes no sense.
“False dichotomy. A belief is a physical process. To say "it's not the belief it's the process" is to say "it's not the process it's the process."”
Nope. No false dichotomy. Worse still is that there was no credible attempt to establish the alleged dichotomy. The term “belief” in the subject materialist context refers to an effect of the physical process. If the effect which is a belief is not a dead end, then it remains the physical process rather than the belief itself which further effects. The materialism at issue better avoids at least semantic incoherence when it refers back to the always determinate physical process that it has asserted; this is better for avoiding ambiguity or relying on other understandings regarding the characteristics or functions of beliefs.
Let’s try this another way: As previously stated, given the materialism at issue, a belief is an effect of a physical process. Not all physical effects are necessarily physical causes. Therefore, it is PERFECTLY sensible to say that the physical process effects some belief subsequent to the effecting of another - even a related - belief. By referring back to the physical process as effector rather than the belief as effector, one manages to avoid making it appear that there is mental potency which is other than the physical.
Martin:
>The bit states in an image file represent the scene "viewed" by the camera.
"I have on my computer an image of a unicorn."
That did not come from a camera viewing a real living being.
"But even if they did, the image still has no physical relationship with them"
Incorrect, in the case a camera took a picture of a real live unicorn. In that case there would be a direct physical relationship between the object being viewed and the bit states in the image file.
"What is the physical relationship? Is it next to (non-existent) unicorns? "
You are getting your directionality mixed up. When the camera views and object the physical relationship is that light is reflected off the object, then focused by the camera lens, then that excites the sensor pixels which transmit signals over wires to memory storage locations. Those are all physical processes that are designed to be deterministic, that is, by design, there is a deterministic physical transfer function from the actual object to the bit states in the image file.
You could call that transfer function and encoding function. Going the other way is a decoding function, which can project patterns of light from a monitor that are very close to the patterns of light that reflected from the original object.
There are no defeaters for materialism.
"there can be no physical relationship between a group of particles and an abstract concept"
An abstract concept is a process of particles. If there are no particles in process then there can be no abstract concept.
There are no defeaters for materialism.
"materialists want to state that matter has no direction or teleology,"
You are confusing directionality again. Matter goes in the direction it goes based on interactions at the most fundamental level, whatever that turns out to be, nobody knows for sure. There is no end goal matter is attracted to, no final cause in any sense pulling matter toward it.
"Computers only have intentionality in a derivative sense."
All intentionality is derivative.
"The problem for materialism is to get original intentionality"
That comes from evolution over some 4 billion years starting with the first self replicating molecule.
The amoeba intends to digest its prey when it envelopes it.
The insect intends to ingest nectar when it lands on the flower.
The beaver intends to build a dam when it chews on a tree.
The lion intends to eat the gazelle when it chases the gazelle.
The chimpanzee intends to eat bugs when it strips leaves from a stick.
Homo erectus intended to butcher an animal when she picked up rocks to knap.
Homo sapiens sapiens intends to do all that and much more.
All intentionality is derived by an accumulation of physical structures we can trace back to the first self replicating molecules.
There are no defeaters for materialism.
You will be much more successful in your quest to deepen your understanding of reality if you keep that basic fact in mind at all times.
To learn how the cosmos functions your most direct path is to stop looking for defeaters for materialism, you might just as well search for the fountain of youth or the holy grail. You are wasting your time in so doing, except to the extent you learn from your mistakes.
Michael,
"the belief itself"
The "belief itself" is a physical process.
There is no such thing a a static belief.
If you write a belief on paper the only static thing is some bits of paper and graphite that have no intrinsic meaning and contain no belief.
To read the paper your brain responds to the symbols and engages in a number of physical processes which are the belief.
All beliefs are dynamic processes of material in the brain.
David Brightly,
> a syntactic business which we know can be done by machinery
But intentionality is absolutely core to this, because machinery cannot do even syntax (much less semantics) without being able to first do intentionality. Machinery can do intentionality because we point at various components and say "this will represent OR" and "this will represent AND," and so forth. Without us assigning symbolic value to the components, it's just a bunch of particles moving back and forth, and no logic gate at all.
>representation makes a causal contribution to behaviour
Sure, but that's not all representation is, since you can have neurons in your head which has a specific meaning and which doesn't cause any behavior in you at all.
> We might say a representation has a purpose, but is a purpose?
The term "purpose" in talk of teleology is often misunderstood as "has a use for intelligent beings" or something like that. What teleology is is just a "pointing": a match points to "causing fire" in a way it does not point to "producing baby sea lions," even if that match never actually gets used. Representation is a type of pointing. The neurons in your head are pointing to Jupiter when you think about Jupiter. Since teleology is anathema to materialists, no materialist reduction of representation or aboutness is ever going to be possible.
>But something that is feebly F cannot be impossibly F.
My only point with Lycan was to show how even materialists agree that representation is a problem for materialists, and is not some off the cuff thing I'm just making up. Probably more directed at Stardustypsyche.
“There is no such thing a a static belief.”
At the very least, the remark above is irrelevant. Beliefs are supposedly necessarily effects of an alleged ubiquitous determinate physical process; if not all effects (such as beliefs) are necessarily effectors, then it is wholly unresponsive - it is irrelevant - to start on about beliefs allegedly being non-static.
Stardustypscyhe,
>That did not come from a camera viewing a real living being.
Correct, it's artwork. But the photo represents a unicorn. What is the physical relationship between the photo and the non-existent unicorn?
>You are getting your directionality mixed up. When the camera views and object the physical relationship is that light is reflected off the object
When the light is reflected off the non-existent unicorn?
>An abstract concept is a process of particles.
Oh? Pray tell, what type of physical process is "constitutional law"?
>There is no end goal matter is attracted to
Yeah, that's my point. Teleology is when something "points to" some end goal. Since representation is a kind of "pointing," representation is a species of teleology, which, as you remind us, you reject as a materialist.
>Homo erectus intended to butcher an animal when she picked up rocks to knap.
You are mixing up two unrelated concepts. To say someone intended to butcher an animal is a type of behavior. "Intentionality" in philosophy of mind is the quality of thoughts to be about things, whether you "intend" to do anything about those thoughts or not. Matter cannot represent things unless intelligent beings like us point to a lump of matter and proclaim that it does.
Stardusty,
Intelligence. I guess I should probably avoid any further acerbic remarks wrt yours.
OK, I see you missed the point.
For materialists the only things that exist, exist physically or not at all. Non-existence is nothing. Nothing cannot be depicted in artwork since there is no substance or properties to depict.
So how can someone draw a picture of nothing and tell me it's a picture of Superman which implies it is a picture of something? And how would I recognize these scribblings as being a depiction of a Superman nothing as opposed to a Batman nothing since nothing has no distinguishing features.
Martin,
But intentionality is absolutely core to this, because machinery cannot do even syntax (much less semantics) without being able to first do intentionality. I'm afraid I disagree. Perhaps it takes more than a blog comment to explain this, as the conventional view of 'derived intentionality', which I reject, is well established. I say a physical system is intentional in so far as it has internal representations of aspects of its environment which can (not necessarily do) causally determine how the system acts in the world, typically to preserve its existence. This rules out rocks, pictures, books, standalone computers, Searle's Chinese Room, etc. But a suitably programmed standalone computer can do the kind of symbol manipulation characteristic of logical inference without the slightest degree of intentionality in this sense.
Your explanation of teleology, if I have understood it, makes it a causal term. I don't see why a materialist need reject it. I note that intentionality is also often explained in terms of pointing, so there is scope here for confusion.
David Brightly,
>I say a physical system is intentional in so far as it has internal representations of aspects of its environment
But see, you're not explaining "representation" physically. Since I'm using the term "intentionality" and "representation" as synonyms, you're saying here that "a system has representational abilities in so far as it has internal representations."
But how a physical system can "represent" anything at all is precisely the problem I'm raising. Matter is not "about" anything.
You should read Derek Barefoot's response to Richard Carrier's review of Professor Reppert's book (the book this blog is named after). He does a good job of pointing out how Carrier "invariably falls back on the very concept he is trying to explain. He stumbles into this trap again and again, despite Reppert’s specific warning about it in the book (CSLDI, 119)."
Martin,
"even materialists agree that representation is a problem for materialists"
I have no such problem. Perhaps other materialists are confused, or still stuck partly in their theistic upbringing, or some such mental impairment.
Martin,
"What is the physical relationship between the photo and the non-existent unicorn?"
The physical processes in the brain.
Light (a physical process) reflects off the photo, is focused by refraction onto the retina, streams of electrochemical signals go to the brain, you experience the image, you associate that set of brain states with other brain states to imagine a unicorn.
"Oh? Pray tell, what type of physical process is "constitutional law"?"
A very great many brains that have a multitude of physical process related to constitutional law. There was no such thing as constitutional law before such brain process were going on and in the event all such brain processes cease there will no longer be any such thing as constitutional law.
There are no defeaters for materialism, none whatsoever. The reason is simple, materialism is the case.
All scenarios are reduceable to material processes.
The physical facts fix all the facts.
bmiller,
"So how can someone draw a picture of nothing and tell me it's a picture of Superman which implies it is a picture of something?
All attempts at defeating materialism are simplistic sophistry, or complicated nonsense.
Yours tend to be simplistic sophistry.
When you look at a picture of Superman does it imply the existence of a real living being Superman for you? If it does, perhaps some of my acerbic comments about your intelligence would be warranted after all.
Stardustypsyche,
>Light (a physical process) reflects off the photo, is focused by refraction onto the retina, streams of electrochemical signals go to the brain, you experience the image, you associate that set of brain states with other brain states to imagine a unicorn.
No, that's a relationship between the photo and your brain. The photo represents a unicorn. So the thing you need to explain physically is the relationship between the photo and a unicorn.
Stardusty,
Me:
"So how can someone draw a picture of nothing and tell me it's a picture of Superman which implies it is a picture of something?
You:
When you look at a picture of Superman does it imply the existence of a real living being Superman for you?
Once again you miss the point. I don't claim to be a materialist, but you do.
For a materialist if something does not physically exist, it does not exist at all. You claim Superman does not exist at all since he does not physically exist. If something does not exist it is nothing. Nothing cannot be depicted. So what do you think you are showing me a picture of?
If you claim you are showing me a picture of a non-physical (or non-existent) thing I will point out that for a materialist "non-physical thing" is a contradiction in terms. If it is "non-physical", for a materialist, it cannot be a "thing" at all. It is nothing and nothing cannot be depicted.
Martin,
"The photo represents a unicorn. So the thing you need to explain physically is the relationship between the photo and a unicorn."
There is no unicorn. I already explained how the photo relates to your imagination of a unicorn. That's all there is, your imagination of a unicorn.
People look at pictures and imagine things, what is supposed to be the problem?
bmiller,
"Nothing cannot be depicted."
More sophistry.
Stardustypsyche,
>I already explained how the photo relates to your imagination of a unicorn.
Right, but then the photo is not a representation of a unicorn. It's a representation of someone's imagination of a unicorn. These are different things. And if we have one image of a unicorn and one image of someone's imagination of a unicorn, then there must be some physical reduction of the distinction between them. So what is it?
Hello Martin,
If you are conflating representation and intentionality I'm not surprised you find my definition circular. To see the distinction consider an old analogue telephone system. I think it's fair to say that the current variation in the circuit represents (re-presents) the air pressure variation at the mouthpiece. But there is not one jot of intentionality here.
I looked at the Barefoot article. I agree with him that Carrier 'overreaches'. Carrier appears to be in thrall to late 20C computationalism, which leads him to say some silly things, such as the laws of logic are laws of physics, to pick one at random.
Stardusty,
More sophistry.
How so? What is the shape of nothing?
David Brightly,
But still left open is your claim that machinery can perform syntax, with semantics left aside. I say this still requires "intentionality" because with materialism, there is literally no objective difference between, for example, the fermions and bosons in the air next to the machine and the fermions and bosons that compose the machine. It's just a single continuous sheet of fermions and bosons, with some areas more dense than others, and that's it. There can't even be syntax without some clearly defined rules that say "this clump of fermions and bosons over here is the subject" and "that clump of fermions and bosons over there is the verb" and so forth. And without us intelligent beings assigning values to certain clumps of fermions and bosons, they cannot have any such value or intentionality because there is no such physical property.
Karl Popper raises this same point in "Language and the Body Mind Problem," and although he's talking more about semantics, the point is similar to the one I made:
Consider a machine which, every time it sees a ginger cat, says 'Mike'. It represents, we may be tempted to say, a causal model of naming, or of the name-relation...
...it is naive to look at this chain of events as beginning with the appearance of Mike and ending with the enunciation 'Mike'.
It 'begins' (if at all) with a state of the machine prior to the appearance of Mike, a state in which the machine is, as it were, ready to respond to the appearance of Mike. It 'ends' (if at all) not with the enunciation of a word, since there is a state following this. (All this is true of the corresponding human response, if causally considered.) It is our interpretation which makes Mike and 'Mike' the extremes (or terms) of the causal chain, and not the 'objective' physical situation.
Martin,
"there is literally no objective difference between, for example, the fermions and bosons in the air next to the machine and the fermions and bosons that compose the machine."
Fallacy of composition.
By your assessment there is no difference between
A few rocks.
Thousands of rocks arranged pilewise.
Thousands of rocks arranged castlewise.
Rocks are just rocks, right? Wrong. The difference is in the relationships between the rocks.
"There can't even be syntax without some clearly defined rules "
Yes, and when you put together a trillion trillion trillion particles in certain arrangements then a convention of rules can be defined.
"And without us intelligent beings assigning values to certain clumps of fermions and bosons, they cannot have any such value or intentionality because there is no such physical property."
Right, materialism is again shown to be the case.
"It is our interpretation which makes Mike and 'Mike' the extremes (or terms) of the causal chain, and not the 'objective' physical situation."
We are part of the objective physical situation, how is any of this supposed to be some sort of problem for materialism?
There is no argument from reason, for god or against materialism, that rises above simplistic sophistry.
Stardustypsyche,
>Yes, and when you put together a trillion trillion trillion particles in certain arrangements then a convention of rules can be defined.
Right, that's what I said. You can point to a clump of fermions and bosons and assign it some symbolic value, such as "these represent the subject" and "those represent the verb" and then you can have your syntax machine. But that requires intelligent beings to do the assigning in the first place.
But as a materialist, you need to show how an arrangement of fermions and bosons can have a value such as "this represents the verb" without any external intelligence assigning that meaning to them.
Martin, you say, there is literally no objective difference between, for example, the fermions and bosons in the air next to the machine and the fermions and bosons that compose the machine. I agree. On the very small scale you are considering one bit of the world looks pretty much like every other bit. But I don't think that is relevant. What counts is how the world looks at the scale of the intentional beings or machines under consideration. And there are real patterns and regularities to be discerned at that scale, plus or minus a few orders of magnitude. Recognising these can be crucial to the continued existence of these beings.
You are right that there cannot be syntax without clearly defined rules identifying syntactical elements like words and punctuation and specifying the patterns in which they may occur. For certain regular artificial languages it's not difficult to program a computer to recognise sentences in the language and perform syntactical transformations on them. You will say, ah yes, but it has required human beings to impose certain 'valuations' on certain electric charge patterns in certain regions of semiconducting material. That's also true. For an isolated entity such as a computer there is nothing that makes any particular regions or their states salient. But what if the computer is embedded in some larger entity in which the results of its computations, ie, the states of its regions, determines how the entity behaves in the world? The valuations might cease to look arbitrarily imposed and start to look like what is needed for an entity to survive and prosper amidst the exigencies of the world. An organism with an embodied mind.
Martin,
"But as a materialist, you need to show how an arrangement of fermions and bosons can have a value such as "this represents the verb" without any external intelligence assigning that meaning to them."
Oh, is that all you want to know? That's easy.
All intentionality is derived from the entire set of organisms that have ever lived, starting with the first self replicating molecule, a finite number of organisms.
To gain some understanding how that worked you can look across the entire breadth of extant species, which are highly analogous to the depth of species that have evolved over the past 4 billion years.
What we now call aboutness, or representation, or intentionality evolved in tiny increments of development over about 4 billion years and the entirety of all organisms that have ever lived.
David Brightly,
>what if the computer is embedded in some larger entity in which the results of its computations, ie, the states of its regions, determines how the entity behaves in the world?
But you are moving between two different things, here:
1. a system that is part of a larger entity causes that entity to move behave in certain ways
2. an arrangement of particles is "about" something other than itself
Now materialists have no problem with #1. That kind of relationship can be described in terms of physical relations: group of particles A is a part of larger group of particles B, and A can push against B to make B move around in various ways. Easy.
It's #2 that materialists cannot provide physical relationships for. If group of particles A is "about" group of particles B, then that means the relationship between A and B is _____. Fill in the blank.
Stardustypsyche,
You're describing origins. What I want is the relationship. If "arrangement of particles A" is of, for, or about "arrangement of particles B," then the relationship between A and B is ________. Fill in the blank, with only a physical relationship, of course.
And also please answer my questions.
If you think they are sophistry, then explain how they are so? I'm perplexed though how asking for someone to clarify their position amounts to sophistry.
Hold on Martin, I haven't used the word 'about', so I don't understand where your (2) comes from. Can you explain?
David,
Intentionality is aboutness:
If I think about a piano, something in my thought picks out a piano. If I talk about cigars, something in my speech refers to cigars. This feature of thoughts and words, whereby they pick out, refer to, or are about things, is intentionality. In a word, intentionality is aboutness.
Martin,
"If "arrangement of particles A" is of, for, or about "arrangement of particles B," then the relationship between A and B is "...causal.
A causes B means that A is about B? Really?
Hi Martin,
We started this discussion back at June 29, 2023 4:58 AM with my complaint that the writer Victor cites doesn't offer a good argument against a materialistic theory of reasoning. I have to make lots of assumptions:
1. a machine can have an internal representation of aspects of its environment which causally contributes to its behaviour,
2. the machine can linearise its representation into sentences in a symbolic language,
3. because logic turns out to be a syntactic and not semantic business it can apply logical transformations to these sentences,
4. the machine can translate new sentences back into new or modified bits of representation and thus alter its external behaviour.
You have to see this as a thought experiment that constructs as it were a counter example to the Lewisian AFR. You have reasonably objected to aspects of this. But I haven't made any assumptions regarding 'aboutness', the machine's awareness or otherwise of the relation between its sentences or its internal states and the outside world, and so on. That's an independent issue and a much harder problem, I think. My limited aim here is to defang the AFR.
Stardustypsyche,
Ok, so I presume by "causal" you mean a physical cause, such as "exerts a gravitational pull on" or "is chained by particles to" or "is pushing against" etc.
So if "arrangement of particles A" is ink on paper in the form of UNICORN and "arrangement of particles B" is a horse with a single horn, then there is...a gravitational pull between the ink and the horse...? Or the ink is pushing against the horse..? Or something like that...?
David Brightly,
>I haven't made any assumptions regarding 'aboutness'
But all of the assumptions you make in attempting to defang the argument from reason implicitly require aboutness in order to make any sense at all. There can't be any "representation" or "translating" or "symbolic" or "language" unless there is a situation in which "arrangement of particles A" is of, for, or about "arrangement of particles B."
Ed Feser has a chapter in his book "The Last Superstition" called "Aristotle's Revenge," wherein he shows how materialists are stuck having to choose, in regards to explaining the mind, between eliminative materialism and dualism, both of which are extremely undesirable. So most of them try to reconcile the mind and materialism by, implicitly and subconsciously, sneaking Aristotelian concepts back in. Such as final causes, formal causes, teleology, essentialism, act and potency, etc. And I would say that's precisely what you are doing. Which is fine! Feser would say that dumping Aristotle was the worst mistake of modern thought. BUT...recognize that that's what needs to happen if you want a "materialist" explanation of the mind. Or accept eliminative materialism. Or accept Cartesian dualism.
(None of this is to say you need to be a conservative Catholic like Feser in order to think his criticism of materialism is good).
Victor,
A causes B means that A is about B? Really?
To the extent one can say that A causes B then B is about A.
The wording of July 01, 2023 7:58 PM was mutual, that is, employed language indicating mutuality.
You (over) simplified that with the notion of one-way causality that seems to commit the fallacy of affirming the consequent. At base, all causality is mutual, but we tend to perceive certain situations as one-way, or unidirectional in causality.
What does the word "about" mean? Well, we can begin to get some indication of common understandings by reading the dictionary. Of course, there are limits to using a dictionary definition, but it can be a reasonable starting point at least.
regarding
concerning
with reference to
referring to
with regard to
with respect to
respecting
relating to
on
touching on
dealing with
relevant to
with relevance to
connected with
So, yes, to the extent that it makes sense to say A caused B then
B is "connected with" A
B is "relating to" A
That's what "about" means, to have a relationship to, a correlation, a correspondence, a relevance to...
This quest to account for "aboutness" is a tempest in a teapot. There is no problem in materialism to account for "aboutness" because the definition of the word
"about" is so simple.
If you wish to infuse the word "about" with some sort of mystical qualities then materialism has no way to account for those imaginary mystical qualities, because they don't exist, so why would any reasonable person feel obliged to account for them?
Sorry, Martin, I didn't quite follow your last comment. You seem to be saying that there is an 'aboutness' relation between symbolic or representational entities and worldly objects that is the province of mind and mind alone? Something along those lines?
Martin,
"is ink on paper in the form of UNICORN and "arrangement of particles B" is a horse with a single horn, "
There is no horse with a single horn to be connected with anything else, or about anything, or whatever.
Your messages have degenerated to confused garble.
One can write UNICORN on a paper. The physical process of reading those symbols contributes to physical thought processes in the reader. What is supposed to be the problem with that on materialism?
Martin,
"Or accept eliminative materialism."
OK, but...
Not some strawman caricature of eliminative materialism.
As soon as you think you have found a defeater for materialism, that is your signal to start searching for your error, because there are no defeaters for materialism, none whatsoever.
Victor,
"A causes B means that A is about B? Really?"
To the extent that one says A caused B, and for every A there must necessarily be a resultant B, then one might say B is a signature of A. A common technical term for B as a signature of A is that B is an index of A.
A common example of index is the old saying "where there is smoke there is fire", smoke being an index of fire. Now, maybe what appears to be smoke is really some other sort of particulate cloud and not associated with fire at all, but then it isn't really smoke. If one defines smoke as a particulate cloud from a fire then whenever we see smoke it must be an index of fire, and if we discover there is no fire after all then we did not really see smoke, rather, we saw something that appeared humanly indistinguishable from smoke.
On that highly restrictive definition of smoke then we can say that smoke is "about" fire, meaning it is necessarily an index of fire, and that fire necessarily caused the smoke.
Now, you might say that is self defeating, because on eliminative materialism fire does not exist, only electrons and quarks and fields exist. Right. Fire is not an existent thing, it is a process of existent things.
A process does not have an independent existence, rather, real existent things do actually change and move.
So you've dug in your heels, and will accept nothing whatever that falsifies materialism. You're mind is made up, so there is no point in confusing you with the evidence. Such evidence is impossible, you say.
Reminds me of the atheist stereotype of religious believers.
Reminds me of the atheist stereotype of religious believers.
The most powerful evidence for New Atheists is their own opinion, as they worship their own reasoning skills.
Stardustypsyche,
>Your messages have degenerated to confused garble.
Yes, that's my point. You can't provide a physical account of how A can represent or be about or symbolize B, because in many cases B may not even exist, so there can literally be no physical relationship between A and B.
>OK, but...Not some strawman caricature of eliminative materialism.
Does the "OK" mean you agree that you are faced with those three choices?
Victor,
"So you've dug in your heels, and will accept nothing whatever that falsifies materialism."
Sure I would, but there is no such evidence on offer. You certainly have not provided any.
What do you suppose falsifies materialism?
"You're mind is made up, so there is no point in confusing you with the evidence."
Based on a total lack of falsification of materialism on offer, a great many attempts to do so, and the failure of every such attempt I have ever encountered I am strongly personally convinced materialism is the case and that no true falsification of materialism will ever be offered.
That is, of course, inductive reasoning, so a reasonable person would hold such a personal conviction provisionally, that is, as a working conclusion that is, at least in principle, potentially subject to modification.
I mean, supposing I die and meet the monkey gods, and they are kind of mad I had not been worshiping them all my life, I will be, like, oh snaps, my bad, is it too late to offer you a banana?
"Such evidence is impossible, you say."
Strawman. In never said that in principle I am absolutely certain that materialism must absolutely be the case.
I am convinced of materialism like I am convinced things will not start falling up tomorrow, and stepping on the next crack in the sidewalk will not result in me falling into an abyss, or any such thing. Those too are things I have become personally convinced of by inductive reasoning.
It would be nice to have more to go on than inductive reasoning but that is all I have in order to estimate the likelihood of future conditions.
"Reminds me of the atheist stereotype of religious believers."
Right, you are stereotyping me, dint yo mama never tell you two wrongs dont make no right?
There is no argument from reason that rises above simplistic sophistry. Balfour, Haldane, Lewis, Plantinga, Reppert...not a sound argument to be found, none at all.
You have demonstrated repeatedly that you are incapable of making a sound argument from reason, incapable of citing a sound argument from reason in the literature, and incapable of falsifying materialism.
Now, I suppose things might start falling up tomorrow and you might provide a sound counter argument to materialism tomorrow but all evidence I have thus far indicates, nope, not gonna happen.
Stardustypsyche,
>The physical relationship is between the symbols and the thoughts
A symbol represents something. The question is how to explain the relationship between the symbol and what the symbol represents. Saying that the relationship is between the symbol and "thoughts" doesn't make any sense, since not all symbols represent thoughts. Some symbols represent, for example, the planet Jupiter. So you need to explain, in physical terms, the relationship between the symbol and the planet Jupiter, not the relationship between the symbol and "thoughts" since the linked symbol is not a symbol for thoughts, it's a symbol for Jupiter.
David Brightly,
>You seem to be saying that there is an 'aboutness' relation between symbolic or representational entities and worldly objects that is the province of mind and mind alone? Something along those lines?
There may or may not be aboutness in things other than mind. The problem is that for any explanation of the mind in terms of "symbols" and "translations" and "information" and "corresponds to" implicitly involves aboutness, and aboutness, whether it exists in the mind alone or in the world, is not a property that materialism can explain. Materialism says everything can be explained in terms of fermions and bosons and their motions and interactions, the four forces, and that's basically it. So using only particles and forces, you cannot explain an "aboutness" relationship between two things because it is quite literally a non-physical relationship.
Stardusty,
In bmiller's case I had become convinced that this sort of argument was mere trollish sophistry and not worth the time to respond to.
I merely asked you to explain your position while giving context for the reason I asked you to explain it since you apparently didn't understand the question. If I got something wrong, it should be easy enough to show me what I got wrong. Retreating in silence does not indicate confidence in one's position.
The debate today is no longer between materialism and theism/christianity (at least here in California). The debate is whether we are living in a simulation. The evidence seems to point toward living in some programmer’s game world with NPC’s randomly scattered around (Martin?).
The world has moved beyond medieval debates into how we fit into the programmer’s simulation
Martin,
"A symbol represents something."
For the person making the symbol it represents thoughts of that individual.
" The question is how to explain the relationship between the symbol and what the symbol represents."
I just did explain that. The physical process of thoughts-motor control-symbol making.
"Saying that the relationship is between the symbol and "thoughts" doesn't make any sense, since not all symbols represent thoughts."
So, it makes no sense to state a universal truth? Really?
"So you need to explain, in physical terms, the relationship between the symbol and the planet Jupiter"
That's easy.
Light from Jupiter enters the eye, nerves are stimulated in the retina, corresponding thoughts are thought, more corresponding thoughts cause motor actions, the pencil moves on the paper in patterns that mean "Jupiter" to the observer of Jupiter.
How is any of this even slightly not obvious?
" the linked symbol is not a symbol for thoughts, it's a symbol for Jupiter."
No, a symbol is for thoughts. The symbol means nothing about Jupiter to those without similar thoughts, say, an English only person who reads the Chinese equivalent of "Jupiter".
Martin,
"Materialism says everything can be explained in terms of fermions and bosons and their motions and interactions, the four forces, and that's basically it."
You left off arrangement, especially, vastly complex dynamic arrangements.
It seems you might be looking at materialism through a cardboard tube, or a microscope, or with blinkers on, can't see the forest for the trees, or whatever metaphor one might prefer.
Materialism has no need to explain some mystical grand notion of "aboutness", there is no such thing. We humans have feelings that one thing is about something else, and that is easily explained on materialism.
If you have some grand far reaching notions of "aboutness" that is up to you to explain, not materialism.
bmiller,
"Retreating in silence does not indicate confidence in one's position."
You can take it any way you wish.
A person might not respond for a number of reasons,
Doesn't know the answer.
Doesn't care about sharing the answer.
Got busy on more interesting things.
Thinks the question is too stupid to bother answering.
Thinks the question is so stupid that only a dishonest person would ask it so it is not worth any time to answer.
Stardusty,
You can take it any way you wish.
Thank you. I'll take it that you think it can't be answered from within a materialist framework.
Hello Martin. I'm not putting forward anything so grand as an explanation of mind or a theory of aboutness. I think a deflationary theory of aboutness can be extracted from my thought experiment but that argument is for another day. I think a machine such as I outline could be constructed with today's technology. If so, then we would seem to have a physical system that applies the laws of logic in governing how it behaves in its dealings with the world. And this would appear to repudiate the AFR as understood as showing that said ability goes beyond what is physically possible. If it's your intuition that such a machine could not be made then that is fine. We might probe a bit into your intuition, though. For example, you worry that my use of a term like 'symbol' necessarily involves semantic content, ie, aboutness. Symbol as in symbolism. But I claim my use is innocent of this. It's symbol as found in symbolic logic, the math-logic-compsci discipline. This is all part of my claim that logic is syntactical, not semantic, as I keep emphasising!
Victor,
Here is one take on the best arguments against materialism.
Dr.Robert C. Koons — "The Waning of Materialism"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZLHKlwue20
Of course, your mileage may vary, but Koons cites:
1.Mysteries of quantum mechanics
2.The irreducibility of life, abiogenesis
3.Fine tuning of the universe for life
4.The hard problem of consciousness
5.Intentionality (aboutness)
6.Irreduceability of the normative dimension of thought
Thus, Koons continues the theistic tradition of painting himself into the ever shrinking corner of scientific ignorance. Wherever science has yet to provide a thorough explanatory theory, that is where god must reside.
Koons does not explain how some supposed immaterial stuff somehow accounts for all these things. Does he suppose there is a little angel nudging each particle along to resolve the specific value of the wave function? Did the finger of god jam together the first self replicating molecule? For each symbol on paper is there some sort of ghost that floats into our brain to whisper the symbol's aboutness to us?
How do all these mystical mechanisms function?
The complaint of Koons seems to be that we lack adequate scientific theories for these items to explain in detail the mechanisms by which these phenomena progress.
What is the theory that describes in detail how angels nudge particles in particular quantum directions? Can Koons write the detailed explanation of how spirits arise from symbols and intertwine with our brains to infuse us with a sense of aboutness regarding the symbols?
I have a simpler explanation, Koons is full of malarkey. He is just arm waving with vague speculations of some sort of spirit world wherever science has not formulated detailed theories.
Particularly cringy is Koons's list of references.
Alvin Plantinga
Thomas Nagel
Antony Flew
Michael Behe
William Demski
Stephen Meyer
The Discovery Institute? Seriously?
I have been looking, Victor, for anything resembling a sound argument against materialism, can't find one, not even one.
Dig my heels in? Against what? There are no sound arguments against materialism on offer, none at all. I have not dug my heels in, I am just standing here asking for some kind of actual argument against materialism. So far all I have heard is crickets.
David,
Let me see if I've got your counter-argument right.
Here is the first part of the AFR.
1. Since everything in nature can be wholly explained in terms of nonrational causes, human reason (more precisely, the power of drawing conclusions based solely on the rational cause of logical insight) must have a source outside of nature.
2. If human reason came from non-reason it would lose all rational credentials and would cease to be reason.
3. So, human reason cannot come from non-reason (from 2).
Your counter-argument seems to be that humans can build computers/automatons which use logic and so since these automatons are physical systems that use logic, non-human physical systems can exist that operate using rational causes/logic.
I'm trying to understand how the counter-argument works. It seems the counter-argument implies that there exist in nature things that have rational causes (automatons) rather than everything having nonrational causes. So premise 1 is defeated by abandoning the assumption that "everything in nature can be wholly explained in terms of nonrational causes"?
Stardustypsyche,
>For the person making the symbol it represents thoughts of that individual.
It does not. A symbol represents an object, or a concept, etc. For example, a "stop sign" represents the concept of the need to stop. It does not represent the thoughts of a person.
>So, it makes no sense to state a universal truth? Really?
It's not a universal truth at all. In fact, it's completely false. Some symbols represent thoughts, sure. For example, the "thought balloon" used in comics is a symbol for thoughts. But some symbols do not, such as the aforementioned "stop sign" or the symbol for Jupiter.
>Light from Jupiter enters the eye, nerves are stimulated in the retina, corresponding thoughts are thought, more corresponding thoughts cause motor actions, the pencil moves on the paper in patterns that mean "Jupiter" to the observer of Jupiter.
First of all, this won't work because symbols can be about things that don't even exist, as I explained above. Light from unicorns enters the eye...?
Secondly, the symbol for Jupiter does not represent "thoughts about Jupiter." You could presumably create a symbol that does that, for example perhaps the symbol for Jupiter inside a thought bubble. Then you could say that that symbol represents "thoughts about Jupiter." But the symbol for Jupiter does not represent "thoughts about Jupiter," it represents "Jupiter," the planet. So as a materialist you need to show how there is a connection between the symbol for Jupiter and, not someone's thoughts about Jupiter, but the planet itself, as that's what the symbol "points to."
You cannot do so with materialism, because that would be a form of teleology, or purpose, or value, etc, which is anathema to you. You seem to recognize this when you later say "Materialism has no need to explain some mystical grand notion of 'aboutness', there is no such thing."
So you simultaneously are trying to explain aboutness (by confusedly connecting a symbol with thoughts instead of the object the symbol represents), AND are saying there is no such thing as aboutness. Which one is it? Can thoughts and symbols be about things or not? If not, then you are an eliminative materialist and you should embrace that and stop trying to work out some non-starter causal connection between thoughts or symbols and the things thoughts or symbols represent.
In short, the reason aboutness is a problem for materialism is not because of magic or God or angels, etc, but because materialism as a worldview rules such items out from the start.
David Brightly,
>I think a machine such as I outline could be constructed with today's technology. If so, then we would seem to have a physical system that applies the laws of logic in governing how it behaves in its dealings with the world.
Not only would I agree, but I'd argue we already have plenty of robots, computers, AI, etc. I never argued that we cannot create physical machines that can behave certain ways depending on inputs from the world around them, and in fact have had those for a long time, for example a simple version would be a thermostat (the field of cybernetics created in the 1950s was in fact devoted to the study of this topic).
None of this gets you even in the same ballpark as the the topic the AFR (and it's related arguments) is getting at. The AFR is getting at "aboutness," as I explained above. That's really the key point of it. In order for a belief to be rationally inferred, it must have been caused by other thoughts that are about things. A thermostat is not about anything. It reacts to its environment, uses a simple "logic" as you stated in order to make adjustments, etc. But there isn't anything in the thermostat that represents something beyond itself, as a symbol or thought does.
Hi BM. The thought experiment is designed to convince you that (2) is false. That is, the fact that a conclusion is reached by physical means---mere syntactic juggling of symbols---does not imply that it does not rationally follow from the premises. If the syntactic juggling accords with a logical law then the move to the conclusion is rational. Movement in thought can be rational even if the underlying causation is physical. It just needs the right architecture of physical substructure. I guess this is to deny the idea of 'rational causation' as a distinct realm from the physical.
Hi Martin. See my reply to BM above. I don't think the AFR is concerned with aboutness. Reasoning concerns the 'shapes' of (sets of) sentences, relative to certain predetermined words---the logical connectives. What the non-logical words mean is irrelevant to logic, and this is actually what makes logic possible. I agree that a thermostat is not about anything. But neither does it 'use logic'. There is no manipulation of sentences going on inside. That's not to say we cannot describe its behaviour in if-then terms, ie, using the material implication connective.
David Brightly,
>That is, the fact that a conclusion is reached by physical means---mere syntactic juggling of symbols
As I said above, in a world of just arrangements of fermions and bosons, there isn't even syntax. For there to be syntax, there needs to be (using the Wikipedia description):
"...rules used for constructing, or transforming the symbols and words of a language, as contrasted with the semantics of a language which is concerned with its meaning."
Rules, constructing, transforming, symbols, words, etc. You don't even have that much, in a world of just fermions and bosons. What you have are clumps of fermions and bosons and the spaces between them, and that's it.
As I said above, in a machine supposedly doing only syntax and not semantics, what or who determines where the boundary is between the fermions and bosons in the machine and the fermions and bosons in the air next to the machine? What or who determines which fermions and bosons are representative of "IF" and which fermions and bosons are representative of "THEN" and which fermions and bosons are representative of "P" and which fermions and bosons are representative of "Q" and so forth? Even if doing just syntax, and not semantics, some fermions and bosons still need to be about those things for it to even get that far.
What you have to do to make this make any sense at all is to say that some of the fermions and bosons work together in a system, and that system works to produce some specific result. But that is exactly Aristotelian philosophy, as I said above. Specifically, that's the concept of form/matter and teleology.
And that would, or should, be anathema to a materialist.
David Brightly,
You said:
The thought experiment is designed to convince you that (2) is false. That is, the fact
that a conclusion is reached by physical means---mere syntactic juggling of symbols---
does not imply that it does not rationally follow from the premises. If the syntactic
juggling accords with a logical law then the move to the conclusion is rational.
I agree that, from the external perspective of a person evaluating the behavior of the machine, its output is rationally coherent. However, you have pulled the ghost out of the material world in order to judge the material structure as rational, so to speak. Quoting Popper from the OP:
Materialists/epiphenomenalists believe that their position is rational, that is
supported by rational argumentation that is weightier than argumentation of their
opponents. However, if materialism/epiphenomenalism is true, this belief has no sense.
Here, Popper is saying that, within the framework of the machine itself, there is no "sense", by which he means a sense or judgement of the machine itself making sense, by which he means a semantic, not a syntactic judgement. That judgement is "intentional" in the technical (from Brentano) sense, and that machine you describe, like current large language models or the procedure in the Chinese room argument, would seem to many to lack that "sense."
Martin, Well, if materialism is the attitude of trying to understand the world in terms of what physics, chemistry, biology,..., etc, say, then I guess a materialist can accept all sorts of aggregated entities, especially if the theory of the more fundamental entities explains why the aggregations can occur. If that's enough to make me an Aristotelian then I'm happy to accept that label :-) Especially as I'd have thought that both Aristotelians and materialists would agree that machines can be built and programmed according to contemporary technological methods. But I don't really see how Aristotelian considerations enter into deciding whether such a machine as I envisage is possible.
William, I'm not really sure what you or Sepety or Popper mean by 'sense' in this context. If you mean that something like conscious perception is absent then I would have to agree with you. But pointing out that this is absent turns the argument away from one about physically realisable rationality towards one about physically realisable consciousness. Not surprisingly, I don't have an argument for the latter! But I do think I have an argument for the former.
Hi David,
That is, the fact that a conclusion is reached by physical means---mere syntactic juggling of symbols---does not imply that it does not rationally follow from the premises. If the syntactic juggling accords with a logical law then the move to the conclusion is rational.
Does F=ma count as a rational conclusion? It appears that I can read that equation out of the physical behavior of things. If that's the case, then it would appear that rationality is encoded in nature just like rationality is encoded in automatons.
David:
There is a secondary intentionality (as per Searle et al) to a machine that works rationally. If I pen a rational argument, it is a page that is rational, so to speak, but only because the reader sees it as rational. The material thing that acts rationally by showing a rational kind of writing is indeed a "physically realizable rationality" as you put it, but only because the reader judges it to be rational.
Martin,
" a "stop sign" represents the concept of the need to stop. It does not represent the thoughts of a person."
A concept is a thought. You contradicted yourself in the space of just a couple sentences.
Absent thinkers thinking thoughts of stopping there would be no concept of stopping.
A stop sigh represents thoughts of stopping.
"the symbol for Jupiter."
The symbol for Jupiter represents thoughts about Jupiter. Thoughts about Jupiter are causally connected to the planet Jupiter. The symbol for Jupiter has no association with the planet Jupiter in the absence of thinkers thinking thoughts about both the planet Jupiter and the symbol the thinker thinks is associated with the planet Jupiter.
"First of all, this won't work because symbols can be about things that don't even exist, as I explained above. Light from unicorns enters the eye...?"
Symbols represent thoughts. Thoughts about unicorns are actual thoughts, so no problem.
You got the idea of unicorns from your sensory perceptions and modifications or re-arrangements in your thoughts.
You can look at a live human female.
You can look at a live fish.
Those thoughts are causally related to those external objects.
Your thoughts can then imagine the female human torso connected to a fish tail.
From those thoughts you can write the symbols MERMAID.
This is all super simple. What part of this is hard for you to understand?
Stardustypsyche,
>The symbol for Jupiter has no association with the planet Jupiter in the absence of thinkers thinking thoughts about both the planet Jupiter and the symbol
EXACTLY! That's exactly my point. A symbol cannot count as such unless some thinker associates the symbol with whatever the symbol represents.
And that's why materialism has trouble explaining the mind. Materialism wants to say that thoughts are encoded in neurons, not unlike how information is encoded in the words in a book. But nothing counts as a symbol in the first place unless some thinker makes the association between symbol and the represented object. So this theory presupposes mind in order to explain mind.
Martin,
"So this theory presupposes mind in order to explain mind."
No.
Materialistic scientific study has amassed vast evidence that there is no single you, no unitary self, no homogeneous mind.
You sometimes feel as though you are having a conversation with yourself because you have multiple parallel processes interacting with each other within your brain.
Brain states are stored as symbols in this part of the brain and analyzed in that part of the brain.
In a digital computer there is memory and there is a processor and those are very different sorts of devices.
Your assertion is analogous to "processing data presupposes a computer to explain a computer". No, a computer is made up of many parts that do different sorts of things all inside the single overall enclosure.
The brain is like that. It's enclosure is the skull.
BM, I guess it follows deductively from F=d/dt(mv), dv/dt=a, and m constant. But I imagine that you are thinking of inductive reasoning here, which I suppose is another kind of rationality, but even harder to formalise than deduction. You will have noticed that for the purpose of my argument I have had to focus down on a very narrow understanding of reasoning within an idealised language like predicate calculus. Actual human reasoning is very much 'looser' than this though it approximates it quite closely in mathematics, for example. The looseness means that mistakes creep in all too easily.
William, I appreciate that 'derived' or 'secondary' intentionality is a term of art in phil of mind. But I struggle to see what connection it has with primary intentionality. The former is portrayed as a static 'property' of inanimate objects and the latter a dynamic aspect of living beings, especially us. Primary and secondary rationality look parallel. My inclination is to steer well clear of the secondary conceptions as they cause a deal of confusion. For example, the only kinds of intentionality on offer seem to be (1) the derived kind, which gains its intentionality through an external mind with primary intentionality, or (2) a 'genuine' mind with primary intentionality which many claim cannot be physically realised, mainly because of the contrast with the dumb, derived intentionality. My view is that there is just one kind of intentionality and that it is physical. I say that what I have been calling 'symbols' have a dual role. They have a logical role as symbols in a language. But they can also play a causal role, by virtue of their physicality, in determining the behaviour of the entity which they are part of. In my hypothetical machine one might imagine a memory location that is part of a symbolic data structure which is also 'memory-mapped', as the jargon has it, to some input/output device. So 'logical' operations on the symbol can simultaneously be acts in the external world. It's through this connection that a symbol acquires semantics. When an embodied mind writes down an argument as marks on paper it is 'linearising' an internal symbolic structure onto an external physical medium which in itself lacks of course the resources to make sense of it. The effectiveness of writing an argument down as marks on paper is that another embodied mind, trained in the same language, can read it and have a very similar, if not identical, symbolic structure recreated within it, and thus benefit from it. The processes of writing and reading are themselves not rational in that they require no 'symbolic thought', though we can see that they have a role in promulgating rationality.
David,
But I imagine that you are thinking of inductive reasoning here, which I suppose is another kind of rationality, but even harder to formalise than deduction.
Not really. I was thinking that if f=ma, and f=1 Newton and m=1kg then a = 1m/s². I suppose the same could be said for all the equations used in science. If that is so, then aren't all physical things that follow physical laws performing the "dual role" of your hypothetical machine? When objects follow the law of gravity, they are both causing movement and exhibiting the rational language embedded within that movement. We observe that motion and can "read" the language. In that case premise 1) of the AFR is defeated since there are no "non-rational" causes in nature.
Martin,
"So this theory presupposes mind in order to explain mind."
No.
Materialistic scientific study has amassed vast evidence that there is no single you, no unitary self, no homogeneous mind.
You sometimes feel as though you are having a conversation with yourself because you have multiple parallel processes interacting with each other within your brain.
Brain states are stored as symbols in this part of the brain and analyzed in that part of the brain.
In a digital computer there is memory and there are processors and those are very different sorts of devices.
Your assertion is analogous to "processing data presupposes a computer to explain a computer". No, a computer is made up of many parts that do different sorts of things all inside the single overall enclosure.
The brain is like that. It's enclosure is the skull.
BM. When objects follow the law of gravity, they are ... exhibiting the rational language embedded within that movement. I sing the body gravitational, as it were?
Ha. My singing voice does sound sort of robotic.
David: Yes, _derived_ intentionality is a better term than 'secondary.' Popper's statement can be re-stated then, as that, if we only allow basic physical laws about matter and energy to create our (accepted as possible, a material stuff-only based rational argument), we can only capture the syntactic content of our arguments, not the semantic content, and thus the derived intentionality based argument lacks 'sense' unless we re-introduce semantic content to that material-only content.
David,
I'd like to explore the hypothetical machine and the "body gravitational" a little more. Let me see if I understand the theory correctly.
Let's say we observe a physical object interacting with its' surroundings and from this we construct a model of its' behavior based on our observations. We think of it as a machine.
The I/O of the machine receives stimuli from the external world that happens to map to an internal structure of the machine and so stimulates the machine to do something in reaction. The fact that the machine does something (predictible?) due to the stimuli indicates that the machine is acting in a rational manner. You and I can know this because we can see that what is happening is what happens when someone reads something written in a language that they understand.
Is there anything more to the model than this? It seems to me that I can model any physical object in this manner. Anything with mass will react in a certain way when it comes into contact with another massive object. Is the object demonstrating rationality then when it moves due to gravity? If not, why not? If it is demonstrating rationality like a language, then who is speaking to us?
Stardustypsyche,
>Brain states are stored as symbols
Right there is what you can't do, as a materialist. A symbol is a type of "pointing" to some "goal," which is teleology, and you cannot have teleology in your worldview if you want to be a materialist. Your position is basically: "I do not accept teleology, now here is some teleology."
David Brightly,
>Well, if materialism is the attitude of trying to understand the world in terms of what physics, chemistry, biology,..., etc, say,
It isn't. It's the attitude of trying to understand the world in terms of what physics says. Whatever biology and chemistry say can be swapped out with ONLY the language of physics, says the materialist.
>then I guess a materialist can accept all sorts of aggregated entities
Of course a materialist can accept aggregated entities. But Aristotelians go a step further by saying that it isn't just aggregation, but aggregation with characteristic interaction between those parts. What distinguishes a living thing from a non-living one is not just aggregated particles (a living person and a recently dead person may have the same aggregated particles), but the way those particles engage in dynamic interaction as a system. That "system" would be a formal cause, with the particles being a material cause. And the activities of that system would all be goal-directed, which would be teleology (final causes).
But materialism arose out of a rejection of formal and final causes, so you can't consistently maintain both.
BM. The fact that the machine does something (predictible?) due to the stimuli indicates that the machine is acting in a rational manner... Is there anything more to the model than this? Yes. Predictability isn't enough. If we can't look inside to see how it works we probably will adopt what Dennett calls the 'intentional stance' towards it. We see it as having objectives and making decisions and actions that achieve those objectives. If we can look inside we could search for evidence that it contained language like representations and applied the laws of logic to them in determining its acts.
What distinguishes a living thing from a non-living one is not just aggregated particles, ... but the way those particles engage in dynamic interaction as a system. That "system" would be a formal cause, with the particles being a material cause.
I'm sorry, Martin, but it's not clear to me what point you are making. That my proposal only makes sense within Aristotelian metaphysics, perhaps?
David Brightly,
>it's not clear to me what point you are making. That my proposal only makes sense within Aristotelian metaphysics, perhaps?
Indeed, as I said above:
"What you have to do to make this make any sense at all is to say that some of the fermions and bosons work together in a system, and that system works to produce some specific result. But that is exactly Aristotelian philosophy, as I said above. Specifically, that's the concept of form/matter and teleology."
Hi David,
So it's not enough that an object behaves rationally we have to disassemble it to check if it's constructed in a way a computer scientist would recognize as doing logic? I think only things constructed by computer builders would qualify in that case. I certainly don't have any computer hardware and software inside of me.
Morning Martin. It's good to hear that my proposal is not incompatible with Aristotle. I hope it's not incompatible with contemporary physics too :-) Which discipline also has something to say about systems of particles, at various levels of size, though it seems to manage without invoking purposes.
Morning BM. Surely. You have a voice. I left that out of my machine for sake of simplicity. And to not get caught up in those unprofitable arguments about derived intentionality.
Hi David,
Yes I do have a voice. But even that does not depend on AND gates and run on a Linux OS.
Are there more instances of rationality other than humans and things humans build to simulate things that humans do?
But even that does not depend on AND gates and run on a Linux OS. Absolutely. There may be many routes to rational beings. One way might be to build rationality in from the start. I'm not claiming that there are artificial rational beings. Just that I'm not convinced by the counter arguments that there necessarily cannot be any.
OK. But what counts as a rational being?
The hardware of a computer consists of AND gates (for the sake of argument). Are AND gates rational? Or do there have to be many AND gates. What if an AND gate naturally occurs? Is the naturally occurring AND gate a rational being?
Are AND gates rational? No, of course not. Did I give the impression I thought they were? I hope not!
David Brightly,
>I hope it's not incompatible with contemporary physics too
It's incompatible with materialism, though. Modern materialism evolves out of the rejection of formal and final causes.
"What if an AND gate naturally occurs?"
That makes me think of an excellent question for the materialists here. What would a naturally occurring AND gate look like? Just hypothetically. And remember, it can't involve any intelligent being external to the system (such as yourself) declaring which part of it represents "1" and which part of it represents "0." It has to be self-contained in that regard.
Hi David,
No I'm not reading anything into your answers. I'm asking these questions because I don't fully understand your position and I'm trying to.
An AND gate takes in electrical voltage levels and treats them as symbols for True or False (or 1 and 0) and decides if the combined inputs amount to a True or False conclusion indicating its' decision with an output of True or False. It seems to be doing a logical/rational action. We know that it is doing a logical/rational action because we designed it to do this even though it cannot tell us so.
If it is doing rational actions, then why is it not a rational being?
OK. This is not easy. Here is a first shot. An analogy. Logic gates are to rational thought as junior school arithmetic is to high school proof. Gates operate on truth values, highs and lows, 1s and 0s, just as addition, subtraction, etc, operate on numbers. (Am thinking here of kids doing 'sums' with pencil on paper) Rational thought and proof operate on propositions. In both cases we search through a forest of propositions looking for a path that leads to a conclusion. Steps on the way to an end point. Perform the steps and the objective is achieved. Finding strategies for achieving ends, like finding a proof, is rarely a 'by rote' business. To think of a logic gate as rational is a category error.
A naturally occurring AND gate? Some kind of neural synapse perhaps?
Hi David,
For an AND gate if and only if A and B are both true the proposition is true otherwise it is false. It may be a simple proposition but it is a proposition none-the-less. Would a group of AND gates become rational if we added more gates in various arrangements to present a more complex proposition? This is sort of how I pictured your machine.
I'm afraid I can't see anything proposition-like (ie, sentence-like) about a single, isolated AND gate, even if the relation between its electrical inputs and output is what we call logical-AND (when it's powered up). Rationality is expressed in what something does. Man is a rational animal, not a humming box in an air conditioned room, no matter how many gates there are inside. Remember, according to my thesis, symbols acquire meaning by virtue of their causal effects on behaviour.
Hi David,
Rationality is expressed in what something does. Man is a rational animal, not a humming box in an air conditioned room, no matter how many gates there are inside. Remember, according to my thesis, symbols acquire meaning by virtue of their causal effects on behaviour.
You say that rationality must be expressed in a certain way or it is not considered rational? So for instance even though an AND gate changes its' output to True when both inputs are True, that is not considered a rational act. Its' behavior did change though didn't it? Do you mean that it must move itself around then? Like a robot? What if I just built a computer and simulated the input and output sensors with another computer so it would look to the first computer that it was moving around. Would it then be a rational machine since it would be doing the same thing that a robot was doing as far as it knew?
I guess that in the brain-in-a-vat experiment the deceived mind is still judged rational. It is rational enough relative to its simulated world. So I would say that the electronic brain-in-a-vat is also rational.
OK thanks.
So it's not necessary for a rational being to move around. I mistakenly thought that may be an issue since you mentioned rational animals as opposed to a humming box. Then it must be the fact that the machine somehow cause symbols to become meaningful due to their causal effects.
So back to the AND gate then. Doesn't it take 2 input symbols and cause a meaningful effect? Lots of AND gates can take more input symbols cascade those outputs into more AND gates and come up with more complex and meaningful results can't they? I'm trying to figure out how your machine can work in principle.
So it's not necessary for a rational being to move around.
Hmmm. I think I want to say that it must interact with its world bidirectionally. It must have causal effects on its world and be causally affected by its world. The brain in a vat is doing this. It causally affects the simulation system and that causally affects it, though no real bodily motion is taking place in real space.
A single and-gate is hardly a subtle intelligence. It carves the world up into four states and acts one way on three of them and another way on the fourth. Might work for a bacterium: swim up when both photoreceptors are active else swim down. But more gates and more gate types surely makes for a more nuanced response to the world.
The materialist view is often dismissed because matter is said to support at best so-called derived intentionality. An external genuine mind such as ours is needed to impose its vision of where the material structure is 'pointing'. I reject this. I say that if a material structure---a suitable data structure in the digital machine, a neural structure in the human brain---is connected to sensors and actuators that interact with the external world, then it acquires genuine intentionality. It can bring the machine or person into acquaintance with some target object. What better 'pointing' is that? The AFR and other anti-materialistic arguments from derived intentionality are intuition pumps knocking down a straw man, in my view.
My kind of intentionality can reach out all the way as it were to the target object in a direct and understandable sense. The antimaterialist's intentionality merely says that there is some 'pointing' relationship between the mental world and the material world for which it offers no account.
Apologies for delayed response. Have been in limbo behind Great Firewall of China.
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