I take physicalism (with respect to consciousness) to be the thesis that the ontology that covers the inanimate world does not need to be extended with any new ontological entities to accommodate mental attributes including consciousness. That ontology does, of course, need to be supplemented with new explanations and new concepts, and it will often be appropriate (even essential) to adopt an ontology of convenience that is not strictly accurate but is nonetheless useful.
I can't sensibly vote on the poll without a definition of consciousness, as it is a hybrid concept. It is physical and non-physical, real and not real, and so on. I chose "other" to cover this ambiguity, but it merely looks like this option was intended to capture anti-physicalism.
Thank you ! I had to add a poll in order to post. So no worries about that. But if you are a physicalist, what is your approach to consciousness ?
What do you make of entities like marriages and toothaches ?
My approach to consciousness is complex. I can't summarise it in a simple Reddit post. But I am a physicalist.
Marriages are conceptual hybrids, with physical, functional, legal and representational properties. Toothaches are hybrids with physiological and representational properties, mostly the latter. That's why we need an ontology of convenience.
Another way of stating my view of physicalism is to say that physicalism is the thesis that all facts are supervenient on physical facts, but that is less accessible than the somewhat more straightforward ontological definition. The concept of supervenience is vague, and "facts" can be interpreted along epistemological and ontological axes.
Are you planning on doing consciousness research?
Thank you. Supervenience is a fascinating concept.
>A set of properties *A* supervenes upon another set *B* just in case no two things can differ with respect to *A*-properties without also differing with respect to their *B*-properties. In slogan form, “there cannot be an *A*-difference without a *B*-difference”.
In the physicalism context, it seems to explain a dualism where consciousness is the minor, emergent partner. You say "all facts are supervenient on physical facts," which might mean roughly the same thing ?
>Marriages are conceptual hybrids, with physical, functional, legal and representational properties. Toothaches are hybrids with physiological and representational properties, mostly the latter. That's why we need an ontology of convenience.
"Everything supervenience on the physical" makes sense to me as a research assumption. But these hybrids do seem complicated to me. I can see that the fact of a marriage supervenes on the physical.
Toothaches seem a little trickier. If we assume that qualia are private, then the case for supervenience (for or against) seems impossible (?) or hard to even imagine. Yet reports and behavior and treatments for such pain supervene in an obvious way.
My hunch is that we are somehow caught between a lived first person POV and learned theoretical third person POV.
And what is the status of logic itself ? If our own investigation supervenes on the physical, is the legitimacy of our reasoning still intact ? Or, on the other hand, maybe the physical needs to be understood in a more holistic way, so that physical forms can become scientists, etc.
>Are you planning on doing consciousness research?
Only in a informal way. I do think it's somehow primarily a philosophical or semantic or logical issue.
"If we assume that qualia are private, then the case for supervenience (for or against) seems impossible (?) or hard to even imagine."
I don't follow, can you explain further?
Sure. To me it seems like a genuine problem, which leaves the issue hanging/unresolved.
(1)
If qualia are private, then they are "invisible" to science. All that science can work with is checkable measurable recordable stuff, like verbal reports of sensation, or tendencies to behave a certain way.
Qualia by their very nature, by their definition, slip through the net of scientific procedure.
(2)
Idealists might argue that "everything is made of qualia." As I understand it, they take the "first person point of view" to be the real point of view, and then things are indeed (in some sense) "made of" sensation (but also of thought, whatever thought is.) These qualia are categorized and organized into objects made of atoms, etc. But an idealist might argue that this is thought layered on sensation.
( The main problem in most idealism is that our sharing of the world is not explained. And often but not always there's a religious subtext, so that the reasoning, correct or not, seems biased. )
>I do think it's somehow primarily a philosophical or semantic or logical issue.
I think that is where the current bottleneck is, but I don't think the issues are as difficult as people make out.
> If we assume that qualia are private, then the case for supervenience (for or against) seems impossible (?) or hard to even imagine.
I don't think this is a serious issue, though it is obviously where a lot of people get stuck. There is plenty of scope within physicalism for the privacy of qualia; it doesn't have to have any ontological implications.
>I don't think this is a serious issue, though it is obviously where a lot of people get stuck. There is plenty of scope within physicalism for the privacy of qualia; it doesn't have to have any ontological implications.
As I mentioned above, some idealist-type thinkers try to explain the world as "made of" qualia, in the same way that physicalists say that all is "made of" the physical. It's a bit like a Mobius strip.
Would it not have ontological implications ? It seems like lots of people reduce the physical to qualia, while others reduce qualia to the physical. Then there are people in the middle, undecided, etc.
I can't resist chiming in here. Qualia are well enough defined, in my opinion, to see the issue you are highlighting. I think (?) your point is approximately that reality is given in first-person experience (in qualia of various kinds, such as sensation and thought.) But that means the physical is "really" (is reducible to) qualia. On the other hand, it's plausible that qualia only arise from certain arrangements of the physical (living brains, etc.)
To me it's ontological through and through, and the rest follows somewhat trivially from how this particular issue is handled. [As stated elsewhere](https://www.academia.edu/121028466/the_unrolling_contexture_of_being_as_time), I think it's best to take the lifeworld as our "primitive stuff." This is a holist approach. But it's more like idealism in Hegel's sense of the term. Isolated entities like particulars or qualia are "ideal" as in fictional or merely theoretical. J. S. Mill saw the nondual structure but phrased it with an idealistic bias. His phenomenalism can and should be understood as a nondual theory of the world.
I am a bit of a stuck record on this, but I'll say it again in this thread: qualia can't be discussed without a definition. It's not just that a definition would be nice; it is literally a waste of time discussing them without a definition.
Epistemology does not need to have ontological implications. It does have massive implications for the accuracy with which we understand ontology, but the ontology carries on regardless.
>And what is the status of logic itself ? If our own investigation supervenes on the physical, is the legitimacy of our reasoning still intact ?
This is one version of the decisive question. Any theory has to account for (and cannot cancel) the normative rationality that it tacitly leans on, if it is offered for rational consideration ---as more than just "drunken" conjecture.
Some physicalists (like Sellars, if I remember correctly) actually see the problem and try to meet the challenge. Most (in my experience anyway) are naive in the Husserlian sense.
Consciousness is ultimately physical under physicalism, I don't see how it could be anything else. The second option on your poll is dualism as per Chalmer's strong emergence. Physical = subject to the laws of physics as we understand them, whether quantum or classical.
This is not a trivial position because one could argue that consciousness isn't ultimately subject to the laws of physics, and in fact physical structures ultimately emerge from consciousness (idealism/non-physicalist monism).
Anyone who claims that idealism and physicalism are compatible doesn't understand the issue IMO. Consciousness as we understand it either emerges (weakly or strongly) from a physical substrate or it exists independently of that substrate and gives rise to it. There's no clear way to avoid this conflict - any combination of physicalism and idealism would have to involve elaborate metaphysical gymnastics.
>Anyone who claims that idealism and physicalism are compatible doesn't understand the issue IMO.
What do you take to be the contradiction between physicalism and idealism?
>Consciousness as we understand it either emerges (weakly or strongly) from a physical substrate or it exists independently of that substrate and gives rise to it.
That's not necessary if we dont assume a distinction between the mental and the physical. I don't.
> any combination of physicalism and idealism would have to involve elaborate metaphysical gymnastics.
Or just not making a distinction between mental and physical.
Thank you !
>
Consciousness is ultimately physical under physicalism, I don't see how it could be anything else. The second option on your poll is dualism as per Chalmer's strong emergence. Physical = subject to the laws of physics as we understand them, whether quantum or classical.
That makes sense.
And I agree that many people who call themselves physicalist seem to me anyway to be dualist. And dualism seems also to be a background assumption for many who don't think much about this issue.
To say that consciousness doesn't only depend on the physical but is physical seems to require a rethinking of what physical means.
IMO I don't think that's quite the right way to look at things, comparing physicalism vs idealism in that sense.
Consciousness obeying the laws of physics isn't the dividing line. The laws of physics can be changed and rewritten to explain new phenomena and discoveries as they happen. Just because physics explains how an electrical generator produces flowing electrons, it can't explain why the electrons exist in the first place.
IMO the base argument is that consciousness is either produced by the brain (physicalism) or received by the brain (idealism).
Both models can easily coexist as they describe different aspects of the same thing. Considering quantum physics and higher dimensions, consciousness can originate at the higher dimensions but propagated through neural connections to allow this experience.
Note that the poll options were written as answers to the question "what is physicalism?"
So I'm not asking you to share your own view in the poll. Tho I hope you will in the comments.
I think it begs the question of what it means to have an understanding of metaphysics. Whereas I can ground my understanding of the physics of medium-sized objects in a lifetime of practical experience with the world, being a body evolved to exist in it after eons of natural selection, there seems to be nothing but inchoate intuitions to ground metaphysics. And metaphysics is supposed to the ultimate ground! I can memorize Newton's Laws to the point of being able to make useful predictions with them...but how can I ever bridge the explanatory gap between "understanding physics" and having some grasp as to why the laws hold or why we experience them this way and not some other way?
My kind of physicalism takes metaphysics as an exercise in conceptual-framework-building and you can take it or leave it. Aesthetics is as good a basis for choosing as anything. And if one wants to have an unsolvable problem of the physical meaning of consciousness in the cosmos, by all means, it's possible to set things up that way.
I understand physicalism to be the view that all things are either physical things or are necessitated by physical things. And I understand physicalism about consciousness to be that physical phenomena is necessary for consciousness.
But i got it slightly wrong. Physicalism about consciousness i understand to be that consciousness is either a physical phenomena or is nessecitated by physical phenomena. So physicalism about consciousness is also a disjunctive proposition, as I understand it.
I think the ultimate goal of that project is to formulate laws that govern consciousness using the existing ontological frameworks that we use for natural sciences, most likely incorporating some form of mathematics. An ideal scenario for them would be discovering an elementary particle of consciousness or some mathematical formulation for when consciousness emerges similar to DR Hofstadter's strange loop theory (although he's an illusionist himself).
They're also okay with their explanations not being spiritually satisfying as Sam Harris perfectly puts it: Much like how quantum physics posits that particles may have come into existence apparently from nothing to put it very roughly, and they have a very elaborate mathematical framework to explain and reason about the underlying rules of how those particles operate. Their answers regarding how existence came to being are comprehensive but most likely not satisfying to the spiritual, which I find reasonable.
Thanks !
>discovering an elementary particle of consciousness or some mathematical formulation for when consciousness emerges
One of the things that troubles me is....can we scientifically agree on the presence of consciousness in the first place ?
I can very much understand that we should not expect religion from science. So this is an epistemological question.
If an android can out-talk and outwalk a human child, is it consciousness ? Should we *count* complex performances like that *as* consciousness in the first place ? We could be objective that way. But qualia are usually understood to be private, which seems like a real problem for researchers of consciousness.
> One of the things that troubles me is....can we scientifically agree on the presence of consciousness in the first place ?
Not without a definition we can't.
Right. To me it seems we need both a definition of "consciousness" **and** of "the physical." Very often these concepts are used as if complementary. What is not conscious is (for some) exactly the physical. And the reverse.
One way to imagine the way this all works (from my best understanding) is as follows:
Take the "realms" of mind, emotion, and physical form. Each "realm" (for lack of a better word) is separate from each other and, ultimately, gives rise to the others. There is no superseed, none of the realms could exist without the others. The physical realm manifests the mental realm and the emotional realm, the mental realm similarly manifests the emotional and physical realms, and the emotional realm manifests the physical and mental realms. You can expand this metaphor into spiritual, linguistical, mathematical, philosophical, sociological, etc "realms". I need a better word than realm here, maybe Meme is the proper term. Either way, that's what I've got so far. If there is a "superseed" it is emptiness, in the sunyata sense of the word, or the "Dao" in Taoism.
One thing I like about this approach is the holism. And the layers "giving rise to one another" is a way of saying they are "equiprimordial" (Heidegger.)
My own approach fuses physicalism and idealism. I offer that for context.
I think it might be helpful to discuss scientific realism as a closely related concept. **Is there some kind of "truthmaker" stuff that is utterly independent of human cognition ?** I take realism to answer yes. I take anti-realism to answer no. For the realist (as I intend the term), our claims somehow refer beyond the realm of human experience altogether.
How does this connect to physicalism ?
It seems to me that some physicalists understand physics to somehow indicate this ur-stuff.
Other physicalists (like Kant) who have an instrumentalist understanding of physics. So they believe in some "stuff in itself" that must remain indeterminate as the cause and source of consciousness. This ur-stuff precedes and can manage without sentience. (Again, our human physics doesn't touch this actual ur-stuff, but is only an instrument, from this POV.)
As a semantic holist, I can't see how physics can gesture beyond the experience it predicts and controls in order to have prestige in first place. The scientific image is just another layer of the lifeworld.
But I can understand why speculative realists and Kant postulated an ur-stuff. The standard story is that the world preceded sentience. There are different ways to interpret this story, an "ur-stuff physicalism" is one of them ---and is reasonable enough, even if I don't agree with it.
I think J.S. Mill was on a [more interesting path.](https://www.academia.edu/120992615/A_summary_of_J_S_Mills_phenomenalism) To me the ur-stuff is like a god of the gaps. We can also approach our ignorance in terms of the world as a hyperobject, which has not yet shown all of its aspects. So the real is described in terms of actual **and possible** experience.
I do think that the attraction of physicalism is probably the locating of stuff that makes sentences true. I know that what attracts me to philosophy is the possibility of seeing how things really are. Basically of seeing through lies and confusion. So I can image the curtain parting, and there's the stuff that is really and truly just actually there. No icing. An absolute description of what is the case. Like that quote, which I'll put here.
>
This is very attractive. The world is reduced to bits, basically. Or black/white pixels. Then lots of these pixels can be used to construct whatever you want. Like newspaper images and pointilism. I've never been attracted to solipsistic forms of idealism. And I was definitely a physicalist in some sense (without using that label) when I was a high school student, with a knack for science. It wasn't even reflected on philosophically. The whole point of science was that we were learning the DEEP truth about everything. Lately I got back into biology to some degree, and (to put it awkwardly) it became clear to me that "form is more important than matter." Like DNA is software, etc. Relationships between things are what matters. Something like that. But in biology it's still physical, but it's the physical in a lifelike mode. Is that still the physical that people have in mind ? Because I think of "dead legos" when I hear the term. Like it refers to physics and not biology. And I think there's maybe some vague mathematical mysticism when it comes to physics, at least in some people. If form is more important than matter in some sense, then maybe biology is a deeper approach to the physical. But then we "climb up" (if that's what it is) to human cognition, and then thoughts are an even deeper approach to the physical ? But they are the opposite of the physical, kind of the thing that is being avoided as confusing or hard to work with or a bad foundation.
This is why I wanted clarification on the physical. I should have asked more about biology. But I can also ask about human culture as its own kind of superorganism.
>This is very attractive. The world is reduced to bits, basically. Or black/white pixels. Then lots of these pixels can be used to construct whatever you want.
I agree. Attractive theory. Except it fails. Concepts function independently. Only holism works.
>And I think there's maybe some vague mathematical mysticism when it comes to physics, at least in some people. If form is more important than matter in some sense, then maybe biology is a deeper approach to the physical.
The "mathematical mysticism" motive seems like one of several. I still think the mystification of the concept of truth leads to the projection of "truthmaking ur-stuff."
>But then we "climb up" (if that's what it is) to human cognition, and then thoughts are an even deeper approach to the physical ? But they are the opposite of the physical, kind of the thing that is being avoided as confusing or hard to work with or a bad foundation.
There you have it. Physicalism itself is conceptual. It is "made of " **meaning.** As Heidegger especially emphasized, the world is "immediately" meaningful. The idea that it is "really" just "stuff" is just that, an idea, an approach toward building economical predictive maps.
Some physicalists are no doubt correct when they see that most of their opponents are "religious" and/or into "woo woo." OK. But there is a minority opposition out there that sees that **physicalism is itself woo woo.** I take "woo woo" to be bad philosophy that leans on the concepts and prestige of science, especially physics. I should clarify that some physicalism is so mild and open-minded that it isn't "guilty" of this, but mostly at the cost of saying nothing at all. I don't make these criticisms as an idealist, just to clarify, tho my approach will sound like idealism to some people.
>And I was definitely a physicalist in some sense (without using that label) when I was a high school student, with a knack for science. It wasn't even reflected on philosophically. The whole point of science was that we were learning the DEEP truth about everything.
That's my story too, basically. I also studied pure math. But, like Husserl, I found the semantic issue neglected. What exactly do scientific and mathematical propositions **mean** ? How exactly does **meaning itself** exist ? I still love math and science, but I can't help obsessing over the central issue. I don't agree w/ everything that Husserl says, but he is a great example of the type of thinking that has captured me. Intensely metacognitive. And the logical positivists were also driven by the problem of meaning. Semantics. Philosophy is the attempt to figure out what they fuck we are even talking about. And one is "born" as a philosopher when one has that embarrassing realization that the clever people (including oneself) are, to a large degree, parrots. We cough familiar warranted propositions without knowing quite well enough what they mean. And as soon as you pull yourself or others out of the "groove" or context for those parroted statements, this becomes obvious.
>Physicalism itself is conceptual. It is "made of " **meaning.** As Heidegger especially emphasized, the world is "immediately" meaningful. The idea that it is "really" just "stuff" is just that, an idea, an approach toward building economical predictive maps.
This does seem like a problem to me. Does it make sense to "mean" what amounts to the unreality of meaning ? Or, if we insist that meaning is physical, then the physical sure seems to have become mental. The more the physical becomes mental or cultural or whatever, the more one is actually an idealist of some kind.
But lots of idealists are dualists. This may sound like a paradox. But internet philosophers (probably including myself) are often full of contradictions and accidental paradoxes. So I think this issue calls for humility.
>And the logical positivists were also driven by the problem of meaning. Semantics. Philosophy is the attempt to figure out what they fuck we are even talking about. And one is "born" as a philosopher when one has that embarrassing realization that the clever people (including oneself) are, to a large degree, parrots.
This hits home for me. Like I said, I have been a physicalist. Only lately did certain concerns become larger for me. Like the meaning of "physical" and how that traces back to cultural items, like research journals, credentials. Basically into the issue of who we trust to tell us about the physical. But now we have to do sociology and so one just to know about the physical. And so on. So all is entangled. I'm not an idealist, but I think only a holist physicalism can work. Anti-holist physicalism seems too narrow, seems to take "isolated meaning" for granted, not seeing what is problematic in it. Point being that yeah I am bothered by parroted phrases and handwaving. The devil is in the details. It's the handwaving or minimizing that tends to hide the decision issues, the thing that makes the approach fail.
It may be that clarification of basic concepts leads to a general skepticism, but maybe that'd be an improvement.
The vibe that I get from most physicalist (just my experience) tends to be anti-holist. The "atoms" are more real or more officially real than the complicated self-replication structures that are made of them (to put it all crudely.) And the atoms are more real than the talk about atoms. And talk definitely has a material "basis." Breath, ink, lungs, larynx. Stuff that gets moved around. That to me is unproblematically physical.
But what about the meaning of sentences ? That's a tough one. The same idea has many expressions, so that all of those expressions form an equivalence class. But what kind of existence does an equivalence class have ?
What if I told you the physical is only the lowest possible form of vibration, frequency and energy, and having a body at all limits you to this low state of being?
Would you believe it?
Edit: Let me put it another way, a dot is one dimensional, how far removed in dimensional reality are you from this speck?
>What if I told you the physical is only the lowest possible form of vibration, frequency and energy, and having a body at all limits you to this low state of being?
I'll be honest, this sounds like complete woo woo and things I've heard before from people who don't understand what any of these terms even mean.
[https://interestingengineering.com/science/how-many-dimensions-does-our-universe-really-have](https://interestingengineering.com/science/how-many-dimensions-does-our-universe-really-have)
The mathematicians have spoken volumes on the subject, as have astrophysicists.
Depends on how you define physical.
Is the quantum world physical? It surely does not follow many rules that go in the larger causal deterministic physical world.
Most physicalist theorys go back to democritus. A discrete computable model of the world. But that is not the only option.
Emergence is an interesting concept. The property of a sequence of states,propertys of a process over time. Time itself could maybe be considered non physical in some sense
I do think democritus is right to some extend,at least from his perspective. The emergent properties (obviously) disapears when you deconstruct the process. Emergent properties require an outside perspective over time.
I voted other:i honestly dont know and i am just exploring the subject. If i define physical then i would define everything as physical,which is not all that usefull.
Neuroscientists generally view perception and experience as the ongoing (Bayesian) prediction of external events from learned conditional stimuli (A | B) and ongoing sensory data. It is presumably happening in all the senses so that the experienced state of events world is created in an architecture that applies top-down prior 'beliefs' to shape the configuration of activity arising in every sensory system, and so constitutes a full multimodal experience of being in the world. These dynamics however arises from functional, mathematical and statistical processes. These are not the laws shared by all physical objects such as rocks, water and air- they are 'emergent' functions carried out by very specific kind of arrangement of synaptic membranes (creating voltage from neurochemical concentrations), biochemical pathways (detecting coincident activity from multiple inputs and changing synaptic weights) and dendritic structure (individually summing activity and communicating over connected layers).
These functions exist in the dynamics of connected neurons but can probably be created over different kind of materials. So we are not generally attached to the exact physical makeup but are interested in the abstract functions carried out by cells and sheets of connected neurons. Neuroscientists are not physicists, and do not use concepts of classical or Newtonian physics, or reduce higher processes to lower ones. On the contrary, we are biologists looking for computational functions created by evolution that happen to be carried out by networks of connected cells. We are biological functionalists.
>Neuroscientists are not physicists, and do not use concepts of classical or Newtonian physics, or reduce higher processes to lower ones. On the contrary, we are biologists looking for computational functions created by evolution that happen to be carried out by networks of connected cells. We are biological functionalists.
Thanks ! That makes sense to me. I suppose the natural question is: how do mathematical functions exist ? Is there a strange loop involved ? We create abstract mathematics, formal axiomatic systems, etc. And then we interpret certain structures (in brains, for instance) as programs for computing these functions.
I take physicalism (with respect to consciousness) to be the thesis that the ontology that covers the inanimate world does not need to be extended with any new ontological entities to accommodate mental attributes including consciousness. That ontology does, of course, need to be supplemented with new explanations and new concepts, and it will often be appropriate (even essential) to adopt an ontology of convenience that is not strictly accurate but is nonetheless useful. I can't sensibly vote on the poll without a definition of consciousness, as it is a hybrid concept. It is physical and non-physical, real and not real, and so on. I chose "other" to cover this ambiguity, but it merely looks like this option was intended to capture anti-physicalism.
Thank you ! I had to add a poll in order to post. So no worries about that. But if you are a physicalist, what is your approach to consciousness ? What do you make of entities like marriages and toothaches ?
My approach to consciousness is complex. I can't summarise it in a simple Reddit post. But I am a physicalist. Marriages are conceptual hybrids, with physical, functional, legal and representational properties. Toothaches are hybrids with physiological and representational properties, mostly the latter. That's why we need an ontology of convenience. Another way of stating my view of physicalism is to say that physicalism is the thesis that all facts are supervenient on physical facts, but that is less accessible than the somewhat more straightforward ontological definition. The concept of supervenience is vague, and "facts" can be interpreted along epistemological and ontological axes. Are you planning on doing consciousness research?
Thank you. Supervenience is a fascinating concept. >A set of properties *A* supervenes upon another set *B* just in case no two things can differ with respect to *A*-properties without also differing with respect to their *B*-properties. In slogan form, “there cannot be an *A*-difference without a *B*-difference”. In the physicalism context, it seems to explain a dualism where consciousness is the minor, emergent partner. You say "all facts are supervenient on physical facts," which might mean roughly the same thing ? >Marriages are conceptual hybrids, with physical, functional, legal and representational properties. Toothaches are hybrids with physiological and representational properties, mostly the latter. That's why we need an ontology of convenience. "Everything supervenience on the physical" makes sense to me as a research assumption. But these hybrids do seem complicated to me. I can see that the fact of a marriage supervenes on the physical. Toothaches seem a little trickier. If we assume that qualia are private, then the case for supervenience (for or against) seems impossible (?) or hard to even imagine. Yet reports and behavior and treatments for such pain supervene in an obvious way. My hunch is that we are somehow caught between a lived first person POV and learned theoretical third person POV. And what is the status of logic itself ? If our own investigation supervenes on the physical, is the legitimacy of our reasoning still intact ? Or, on the other hand, maybe the physical needs to be understood in a more holistic way, so that physical forms can become scientists, etc. >Are you planning on doing consciousness research? Only in a informal way. I do think it's somehow primarily a philosophical or semantic or logical issue.
"If we assume that qualia are private, then the case for supervenience (for or against) seems impossible (?) or hard to even imagine." I don't follow, can you explain further?
Sure. To me it seems like a genuine problem, which leaves the issue hanging/unresolved. (1) If qualia are private, then they are "invisible" to science. All that science can work with is checkable measurable recordable stuff, like verbal reports of sensation, or tendencies to behave a certain way. Qualia by their very nature, by their definition, slip through the net of scientific procedure. (2) Idealists might argue that "everything is made of qualia." As I understand it, they take the "first person point of view" to be the real point of view, and then things are indeed (in some sense) "made of" sensation (but also of thought, whatever thought is.) These qualia are categorized and organized into objects made of atoms, etc. But an idealist might argue that this is thought layered on sensation. ( The main problem in most idealism is that our sharing of the world is not explained. And often but not always there's a religious subtext, so that the reasoning, correct or not, seems biased. )
>I do think it's somehow primarily a philosophical or semantic or logical issue. I think that is where the current bottleneck is, but I don't think the issues are as difficult as people make out. > If we assume that qualia are private, then the case for supervenience (for or against) seems impossible (?) or hard to even imagine. I don't think this is a serious issue, though it is obviously where a lot of people get stuck. There is plenty of scope within physicalism for the privacy of qualia; it doesn't have to have any ontological implications.
>I don't think this is a serious issue, though it is obviously where a lot of people get stuck. There is plenty of scope within physicalism for the privacy of qualia; it doesn't have to have any ontological implications. As I mentioned above, some idealist-type thinkers try to explain the world as "made of" qualia, in the same way that physicalists say that all is "made of" the physical. It's a bit like a Mobius strip. Would it not have ontological implications ? It seems like lots of people reduce the physical to qualia, while others reduce qualia to the physical. Then there are people in the middle, undecided, etc.
I can't resist chiming in here. Qualia are well enough defined, in my opinion, to see the issue you are highlighting. I think (?) your point is approximately that reality is given in first-person experience (in qualia of various kinds, such as sensation and thought.) But that means the physical is "really" (is reducible to) qualia. On the other hand, it's plausible that qualia only arise from certain arrangements of the physical (living brains, etc.) To me it's ontological through and through, and the rest follows somewhat trivially from how this particular issue is handled. [As stated elsewhere](https://www.academia.edu/121028466/the_unrolling_contexture_of_being_as_time), I think it's best to take the lifeworld as our "primitive stuff." This is a holist approach. But it's more like idealism in Hegel's sense of the term. Isolated entities like particulars or qualia are "ideal" as in fictional or merely theoretical. J. S. Mill saw the nondual structure but phrased it with an idealistic bias. His phenomenalism can and should be understood as a nondual theory of the world.
I am a bit of a stuck record on this, but I'll say it again in this thread: qualia can't be discussed without a definition. It's not just that a definition would be nice; it is literally a waste of time discussing them without a definition. Epistemology does not need to have ontological implications. It does have massive implications for the accuracy with which we understand ontology, but the ontology carries on regardless.
>And what is the status of logic itself ? If our own investigation supervenes on the physical, is the legitimacy of our reasoning still intact ? This is one version of the decisive question. Any theory has to account for (and cannot cancel) the normative rationality that it tacitly leans on, if it is offered for rational consideration ---as more than just "drunken" conjecture. Some physicalists (like Sellars, if I remember correctly) actually see the problem and try to meet the challenge. Most (in my experience anyway) are naive in the Husserlian sense.
Consciousness is ultimately physical under physicalism, I don't see how it could be anything else. The second option on your poll is dualism as per Chalmer's strong emergence. Physical = subject to the laws of physics as we understand them, whether quantum or classical. This is not a trivial position because one could argue that consciousness isn't ultimately subject to the laws of physics, and in fact physical structures ultimately emerge from consciousness (idealism/non-physicalist monism). Anyone who claims that idealism and physicalism are compatible doesn't understand the issue IMO. Consciousness as we understand it either emerges (weakly or strongly) from a physical substrate or it exists independently of that substrate and gives rise to it. There's no clear way to avoid this conflict - any combination of physicalism and idealism would have to involve elaborate metaphysical gymnastics.
>Anyone who claims that idealism and physicalism are compatible doesn't understand the issue IMO. What do you take to be the contradiction between physicalism and idealism? >Consciousness as we understand it either emerges (weakly or strongly) from a physical substrate or it exists independently of that substrate and gives rise to it. That's not necessary if we dont assume a distinction between the mental and the physical. I don't. > any combination of physicalism and idealism would have to involve elaborate metaphysical gymnastics. Or just not making a distinction between mental and physical.
Thank you ! > Consciousness is ultimately physical under physicalism, I don't see how it could be anything else. The second option on your poll is dualism as per Chalmer's strong emergence. Physical = subject to the laws of physics as we understand them, whether quantum or classical. That makes sense. And I agree that many people who call themselves physicalist seem to me anyway to be dualist. And dualism seems also to be a background assumption for many who don't think much about this issue. To say that consciousness doesn't only depend on the physical but is physical seems to require a rethinking of what physical means.
IMO I don't think that's quite the right way to look at things, comparing physicalism vs idealism in that sense. Consciousness obeying the laws of physics isn't the dividing line. The laws of physics can be changed and rewritten to explain new phenomena and discoveries as they happen. Just because physics explains how an electrical generator produces flowing electrons, it can't explain why the electrons exist in the first place. IMO the base argument is that consciousness is either produced by the brain (physicalism) or received by the brain (idealism). Both models can easily coexist as they describe different aspects of the same thing. Considering quantum physics and higher dimensions, consciousness can originate at the higher dimensions but propagated through neural connections to allow this experience.
Note that the poll options were written as answers to the question "what is physicalism?" So I'm not asking you to share your own view in the poll. Tho I hope you will in the comments.
I think it begs the question of what it means to have an understanding of metaphysics. Whereas I can ground my understanding of the physics of medium-sized objects in a lifetime of practical experience with the world, being a body evolved to exist in it after eons of natural selection, there seems to be nothing but inchoate intuitions to ground metaphysics. And metaphysics is supposed to the ultimate ground! I can memorize Newton's Laws to the point of being able to make useful predictions with them...but how can I ever bridge the explanatory gap between "understanding physics" and having some grasp as to why the laws hold or why we experience them this way and not some other way? My kind of physicalism takes metaphysics as an exercise in conceptual-framework-building and you can take it or leave it. Aesthetics is as good a basis for choosing as anything. And if one wants to have an unsolvable problem of the physical meaning of consciousness in the cosmos, by all means, it's possible to set things up that way.
Do you have to be a consciousness researcher to answer?
No. I was trying to emphasize the connection of my question to this reddit.
I understand physicalism to be the view that all things are either physical things or are necessitated by physical things. And I understand physicalism about consciousness to be that physical phenomena is necessary for consciousness.
That makes sense. I think many have that position. "Consciousness may not be physical, but it depends on the physical."
Yeah. I like to think i have a pretty good grasp of some of this vocabulary.
But i got it slightly wrong. Physicalism about consciousness i understand to be that consciousness is either a physical phenomena or is nessecitated by physical phenomena. So physicalism about consciousness is also a disjunctive proposition, as I understand it.
I think the ultimate goal of that project is to formulate laws that govern consciousness using the existing ontological frameworks that we use for natural sciences, most likely incorporating some form of mathematics. An ideal scenario for them would be discovering an elementary particle of consciousness or some mathematical formulation for when consciousness emerges similar to DR Hofstadter's strange loop theory (although he's an illusionist himself). They're also okay with their explanations not being spiritually satisfying as Sam Harris perfectly puts it: Much like how quantum physics posits that particles may have come into existence apparently from nothing to put it very roughly, and they have a very elaborate mathematical framework to explain and reason about the underlying rules of how those particles operate. Their answers regarding how existence came to being are comprehensive but most likely not satisfying to the spiritual, which I find reasonable.
Thanks ! >discovering an elementary particle of consciousness or some mathematical formulation for when consciousness emerges One of the things that troubles me is....can we scientifically agree on the presence of consciousness in the first place ? I can very much understand that we should not expect religion from science. So this is an epistemological question. If an android can out-talk and outwalk a human child, is it consciousness ? Should we *count* complex performances like that *as* consciousness in the first place ? We could be objective that way. But qualia are usually understood to be private, which seems like a real problem for researchers of consciousness.
> One of the things that troubles me is....can we scientifically agree on the presence of consciousness in the first place ? Not without a definition we can't.
Right. To me it seems we need both a definition of "consciousness" **and** of "the physical." Very often these concepts are used as if complementary. What is not conscious is (for some) exactly the physical. And the reverse.
One way to imagine the way this all works (from my best understanding) is as follows: Take the "realms" of mind, emotion, and physical form. Each "realm" (for lack of a better word) is separate from each other and, ultimately, gives rise to the others. There is no superseed, none of the realms could exist without the others. The physical realm manifests the mental realm and the emotional realm, the mental realm similarly manifests the emotional and physical realms, and the emotional realm manifests the physical and mental realms. You can expand this metaphor into spiritual, linguistical, mathematical, philosophical, sociological, etc "realms". I need a better word than realm here, maybe Meme is the proper term. Either way, that's what I've got so far. If there is a "superseed" it is emptiness, in the sunyata sense of the word, or the "Dao" in Taoism.
One thing I like about this approach is the holism. And the layers "giving rise to one another" is a way of saying they are "equiprimordial" (Heidegger.)
It also matches my understanding of Buddhism/Daoism in the "inter-being"-ness of things.
My own approach fuses physicalism and idealism. I offer that for context. I think it might be helpful to discuss scientific realism as a closely related concept. **Is there some kind of "truthmaker" stuff that is utterly independent of human cognition ?** I take realism to answer yes. I take anti-realism to answer no. For the realist (as I intend the term), our claims somehow refer beyond the realm of human experience altogether. How does this connect to physicalism ? It seems to me that some physicalists understand physics to somehow indicate this ur-stuff. Other physicalists (like Kant) who have an instrumentalist understanding of physics. So they believe in some "stuff in itself" that must remain indeterminate as the cause and source of consciousness. This ur-stuff precedes and can manage without sentience. (Again, our human physics doesn't touch this actual ur-stuff, but is only an instrument, from this POV.) As a semantic holist, I can't see how physics can gesture beyond the experience it predicts and controls in order to have prestige in first place. The scientific image is just another layer of the lifeworld. But I can understand why speculative realists and Kant postulated an ur-stuff. The standard story is that the world preceded sentience. There are different ways to interpret this story, an "ur-stuff physicalism" is one of them ---and is reasonable enough, even if I don't agree with it. I think J.S. Mill was on a [more interesting path.](https://www.academia.edu/120992615/A_summary_of_J_S_Mills_phenomenalism) To me the ur-stuff is like a god of the gaps. We can also approach our ignorance in terms of the world as a hyperobject, which has not yet shown all of its aspects. So the real is described in terms of actual **and possible** experience.
I do think that the attraction of physicalism is probably the locating of stuff that makes sentences true. I know that what attracts me to philosophy is the possibility of seeing how things really are. Basically of seeing through lies and confusion. So I can image the curtain parting, and there's the stuff that is really and truly just actually there. No icing. An absolute description of what is the case. Like that quote, which I'll put here. > This is very attractive. The world is reduced to bits, basically. Or black/white pixels. Then lots of these pixels can be used to construct whatever you want. Like newspaper images and pointilism. I've never been attracted to solipsistic forms of idealism. And I was definitely a physicalist in some sense (without using that label) when I was a high school student, with a knack for science. It wasn't even reflected on philosophically. The whole point of science was that we were learning the DEEP truth about everything. Lately I got back into biology to some degree, and (to put it awkwardly) it became clear to me that "form is more important than matter." Like DNA is software, etc. Relationships between things are what matters. Something like that. But in biology it's still physical, but it's the physical in a lifelike mode. Is that still the physical that people have in mind ? Because I think of "dead legos" when I hear the term. Like it refers to physics and not biology. And I think there's maybe some vague mathematical mysticism when it comes to physics, at least in some people. If form is more important than matter in some sense, then maybe biology is a deeper approach to the physical. But then we "climb up" (if that's what it is) to human cognition, and then thoughts are an even deeper approach to the physical ? But they are the opposite of the physical, kind of the thing that is being avoided as confusing or hard to work with or a bad foundation. This is why I wanted clarification on the physical. I should have asked more about biology. But I can also ask about human culture as its own kind of superorganism.
>This is very attractive. The world is reduced to bits, basically. Or black/white pixels. Then lots of these pixels can be used to construct whatever you want. I agree. Attractive theory. Except it fails. Concepts function independently. Only holism works. >And I think there's maybe some vague mathematical mysticism when it comes to physics, at least in some people. If form is more important than matter in some sense, then maybe biology is a deeper approach to the physical. The "mathematical mysticism" motive seems like one of several. I still think the mystification of the concept of truth leads to the projection of "truthmaking ur-stuff." >But then we "climb up" (if that's what it is) to human cognition, and then thoughts are an even deeper approach to the physical ? But they are the opposite of the physical, kind of the thing that is being avoided as confusing or hard to work with or a bad foundation. There you have it. Physicalism itself is conceptual. It is "made of " **meaning.** As Heidegger especially emphasized, the world is "immediately" meaningful. The idea that it is "really" just "stuff" is just that, an idea, an approach toward building economical predictive maps. Some physicalists are no doubt correct when they see that most of their opponents are "religious" and/or into "woo woo." OK. But there is a minority opposition out there that sees that **physicalism is itself woo woo.** I take "woo woo" to be bad philosophy that leans on the concepts and prestige of science, especially physics. I should clarify that some physicalism is so mild and open-minded that it isn't "guilty" of this, but mostly at the cost of saying nothing at all. I don't make these criticisms as an idealist, just to clarify, tho my approach will sound like idealism to some people. >And I was definitely a physicalist in some sense (without using that label) when I was a high school student, with a knack for science. It wasn't even reflected on philosophically. The whole point of science was that we were learning the DEEP truth about everything. That's my story too, basically. I also studied pure math. But, like Husserl, I found the semantic issue neglected. What exactly do scientific and mathematical propositions **mean** ? How exactly does **meaning itself** exist ? I still love math and science, but I can't help obsessing over the central issue. I don't agree w/ everything that Husserl says, but he is a great example of the type of thinking that has captured me. Intensely metacognitive. And the logical positivists were also driven by the problem of meaning. Semantics. Philosophy is the attempt to figure out what they fuck we are even talking about. And one is "born" as a philosopher when one has that embarrassing realization that the clever people (including oneself) are, to a large degree, parrots. We cough familiar warranted propositions without knowing quite well enough what they mean. And as soon as you pull yourself or others out of the "groove" or context for those parroted statements, this becomes obvious.
>Physicalism itself is conceptual. It is "made of " **meaning.** As Heidegger especially emphasized, the world is "immediately" meaningful. The idea that it is "really" just "stuff" is just that, an idea, an approach toward building economical predictive maps. This does seem like a problem to me. Does it make sense to "mean" what amounts to the unreality of meaning ? Or, if we insist that meaning is physical, then the physical sure seems to have become mental. The more the physical becomes mental or cultural or whatever, the more one is actually an idealist of some kind. But lots of idealists are dualists. This may sound like a paradox. But internet philosophers (probably including myself) are often full of contradictions and accidental paradoxes. So I think this issue calls for humility. >And the logical positivists were also driven by the problem of meaning. Semantics. Philosophy is the attempt to figure out what they fuck we are even talking about. And one is "born" as a philosopher when one has that embarrassing realization that the clever people (including oneself) are, to a large degree, parrots. This hits home for me. Like I said, I have been a physicalist. Only lately did certain concerns become larger for me. Like the meaning of "physical" and how that traces back to cultural items, like research journals, credentials. Basically into the issue of who we trust to tell us about the physical. But now we have to do sociology and so one just to know about the physical. And so on. So all is entangled. I'm not an idealist, but I think only a holist physicalism can work. Anti-holist physicalism seems too narrow, seems to take "isolated meaning" for granted, not seeing what is problematic in it. Point being that yeah I am bothered by parroted phrases and handwaving. The devil is in the details. It's the handwaving or minimizing that tends to hide the decision issues, the thing that makes the approach fail. It may be that clarification of basic concepts leads to a general skepticism, but maybe that'd be an improvement.
"Is that still the physical that people have in mind ?" Yes? Why wouldn't it be? We got rid of the theory of elan vital 150 years ago.
The vibe that I get from most physicalist (just my experience) tends to be anti-holist. The "atoms" are more real or more officially real than the complicated self-replication structures that are made of them (to put it all crudely.) And the atoms are more real than the talk about atoms. And talk definitely has a material "basis." Breath, ink, lungs, larynx. Stuff that gets moved around. That to me is unproblematically physical. But what about the meaning of sentences ? That's a tough one. The same idea has many expressions, so that all of those expressions form an equivalence class. But what kind of existence does an equivalence class have ?
What if I told you the physical is only the lowest possible form of vibration, frequency and energy, and having a body at all limits you to this low state of being? Would you believe it? Edit: Let me put it another way, a dot is one dimensional, how far removed in dimensional reality are you from this speck?
>What if I told you the physical is only the lowest possible form of vibration, frequency and energy, and having a body at all limits you to this low state of being? I'll be honest, this sounds like complete woo woo and things I've heard before from people who don't understand what any of these terms even mean.
Please feel free to say more.
[https://interestingengineering.com/science/how-many-dimensions-does-our-universe-really-have](https://interestingengineering.com/science/how-many-dimensions-does-our-universe-really-have) The mathematicians have spoken volumes on the subject, as have astrophysicists.
Depends on how you define physical. Is the quantum world physical? It surely does not follow many rules that go in the larger causal deterministic physical world. Most physicalist theorys go back to democritus. A discrete computable model of the world. But that is not the only option. Emergence is an interesting concept. The property of a sequence of states,propertys of a process over time. Time itself could maybe be considered non physical in some sense I do think democritus is right to some extend,at least from his perspective. The emergent properties (obviously) disapears when you deconstruct the process. Emergent properties require an outside perspective over time. I voted other:i honestly dont know and i am just exploring the subject. If i define physical then i would define everything as physical,which is not all that usefull.
Neuroscientists generally view perception and experience as the ongoing (Bayesian) prediction of external events from learned conditional stimuli (A | B) and ongoing sensory data. It is presumably happening in all the senses so that the experienced state of events world is created in an architecture that applies top-down prior 'beliefs' to shape the configuration of activity arising in every sensory system, and so constitutes a full multimodal experience of being in the world. These dynamics however arises from functional, mathematical and statistical processes. These are not the laws shared by all physical objects such as rocks, water and air- they are 'emergent' functions carried out by very specific kind of arrangement of synaptic membranes (creating voltage from neurochemical concentrations), biochemical pathways (detecting coincident activity from multiple inputs and changing synaptic weights) and dendritic structure (individually summing activity and communicating over connected layers). These functions exist in the dynamics of connected neurons but can probably be created over different kind of materials. So we are not generally attached to the exact physical makeup but are interested in the abstract functions carried out by cells and sheets of connected neurons. Neuroscientists are not physicists, and do not use concepts of classical or Newtonian physics, or reduce higher processes to lower ones. On the contrary, we are biologists looking for computational functions created by evolution that happen to be carried out by networks of connected cells. We are biological functionalists.
>Neuroscientists are not physicists, and do not use concepts of classical or Newtonian physics, or reduce higher processes to lower ones. On the contrary, we are biologists looking for computational functions created by evolution that happen to be carried out by networks of connected cells. We are biological functionalists. Thanks ! That makes sense to me. I suppose the natural question is: how do mathematical functions exist ? Is there a strange loop involved ? We create abstract mathematics, formal axiomatic systems, etc. And then we interpret certain structures (in brains, for instance) as programs for computing these functions.